Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

Comedy is good at analysing and dealing with evil because it doesn't present it as evil but a collection of banalities.

People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.

Love's ship has foundered on the rocks of life. We're quits: stupid to draw up a list of mutual sorrows, hurts and pains.

Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain.

I cried over beauty, I cried over pain, and the other time I cried because I felt nothing. I can't help it. I'm just a cliché of myself.

You lit into me last night. You said what I did was stupid. - That's what my head said. But my heart... My stupid heart... Her voice broke. It was singing.

How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It's not right, it's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain?

Let’s suppose that rain washes out a picnic. Who is feeling negative? The rain? Or you? What’s causing the negative feeling? The rain or your reaction? When you bump your knee against a table, the table’s fine. It’s busy being what it was made to be – a table. The pain is in your knee, not in the table. The mystics keep trying to tell us that reality is all right. Reality is not problematic. Problems exist only in the human mind. We might add: in the stupid, sleeping human mind.

Every Harry Potter film features Lord Voldemort, who stereotypes evil. And movies that discriminate against evil have no place on campus, because evil has feelings, too. Terrorists cry during commercials and mad bombers enjoy long walks and campfires, too.

When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, "Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure."

What were good and evil, really, but stupid categories? Stupid categories that restricted people and punished or rewarded them based on how they responded to their own natures, natures they really didn't have any way to control.

The Detective was different. Not that he wasn't a good man; Willie had heard enough about him to understand that he was the kind who didn't like to turn away from another's pain, the kind who couldn't put a pillow over his ears to drown out the cries of strangers. Those scars he had were badges of courage, and Willie knew that there were others hidden beneath his clothes, and still more deep inside, right beneath the skin and down to the soul. No, it was just that whatever goodness was there coexisted with rage and grief and loss.

That cotton trade was almost the deal breaker for me. It was at that point that I said, “Mr. Stupid, why risk everything on one trade? Why not make your life a pursuit of happiness rather than pain?

Man's condition is horrible because, no matter what form his happiness may take, it arises from some species of ignorance.

No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us forever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong.

When you are dead, you do not know you are dead. It's only painful and difficult for others. The same applies when you are stupid.

Maybe right and wrong did not move, but understanding of them did. The wrenching pain of walking the same path, even for a short space, tore away the willingness to judge.

To live only to suffer—only to feel the injury of life repeated and enlarged—it seemed to her she was too valuable, too capable, for that. Then she wondered if it were vain and stupid to think so well of herself. When had it even been a guarantee to be valuable? Wasn't all history full of the destruction of precious things? Wasn't it much more probable that if one were fine one would suffer?

Life is cruel and we do terrible things to each other.

The idea of caring is that someone is making money faster [than you are] is one of the deadly sins. Envy is a really stupid sin because it’s the only one you could never possibly have any fun at. There’s a lot of pain and no fun. Why would you want to get on that trolley?

I still am amazed that people would never buy a car if they were told it gets 75 miles to the gallon - they're absolutely clear on what's a scam. But when it comes to their health they will immediately fall for somebody telling them, "Take this pill and you'll live to be a hundred years old." There's something about medicine that allows us to fall for stupid sales pitches more easily.

I am addicted to prescription pain medication.

Just as the results of inebriety are most painful to the habitually sober, and just as the greatest saints have often been the greatest sinners, so, when the first class brain does something stupid, the stupidity of that occasion is colossal.

Ralston stiffened at the reference to the stupid wager that caused so much pain and unhappiness. He ignored Oxford's proffered hand, and instead met the baron's concerned gaze, and said, "Keep the money. I have her. She's all I want.

This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.