Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

I got old the way that women who aren't actresses grow old.

I'm eulogised by a lot of men, but they wouldn't take me home to meet their mothers.

I don't think 'Motherhood' is a map for women. I would never say that it's a template for every woman in response to her biology.

We actively encourage teenagers not to have babies, we applaud young career women in their twenties, then before you know it you find yourself, as I did, aged 32 at a friend's wedding and being quizzed by everyone about why you haven't got round to reproducing yet.

You were born with your legs apart. They'll send you to the grave in a Y-shaped coffin.

Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain.

It doesn't help that we are three generations of actresses, who are always obsessed with losing time. But on the other side, historically, women have much more time on their hands than before. It goes together-the more time we have, the more we're flipping out about how we've got to deal with it.

You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.

I knew everything a woman hated even before I remotely knew anything a woman liked.

We are still in various kinds of patriarchal systems. The very definition of patriarchy is that men control women as the means of reproduction, so the idea that a woman's main role is to have children often means society wants more workers, more soldiers. The idea that how many children we have should be controlled by the family, the church, the nation - by anyone but women themselves - is still very deep and very strong.

women who once aspired to the image of superwoman now worry about becoming superdrudge. Those who wanted to have it all now ask whether they have to do it all.

And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.

A strange alternative * * *Must women have a doctor or a dance?

I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man's housekeeper. When I was young, if a girl married poverty, she became a drudge; if she married wealth, she became a doll. Had I married at twenty-one, I would have been either a drudge or a doll for fifty-five years. Think of it!

Women always put men first. That's how everything got so screwed up.

I felt like I had to be conscious of myself as a girl for the first time. I had to be more feminine. I had to look a certain way. And it's something that you want to suffer in silence, but I would go onto movie sets and they would bring out bras that were basically binders, because there were continuity problems between months.

Man may content himself with the applause of the world and the homage paid to his intellect, but woman's heart has holier idols.

Some days you just want to get dressed and go about your business. But if you're a woman, you can't, because there is no unmarked woman.

If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.

She could not explain or quite understand that it wasn't altogether jealousy she felt, it was rage. And not because she couldn't shop like that or dress like that. It was because that was what girls were supposed to be like. That was what men - people, everybody - thought they should be like. Beautiful, treasured, spoiled, selfish, pea-brained. That was what a girl should be, to be fallen in love with. Then she would become a mother and she'd be all mushily devoted to her babies. Not selfish anymore, but just as pea-brained. Forever.

women have no existence except in love; the history of their life begins and ends with love!

Marriage is for noblewomen with nothing else to do.

It was the era that I later analyzed, the "feminine mystique" era, [when] "career woman" was a dirty word. And so I didn't want a career anymore. [But] I had to do something. So I started freelancing for women's magazines.

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison. Men have various employments and pursuits which engage their attention, and give a character to the opening mind; but women, confined to one, and having their thoughts constantly directed to the most insignificant part of themselves, seldom extend their views beyond the triumph of the hour.