We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.

In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves.

He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.

In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.

This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

She found that their company revived her, carried her away from the constant presence of last night's terror, little by little, till she could begin to look back on it as something that had happened, not something that was happening, that must always be happening to her.

He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand.

“I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live.”

We are all dead, and we spoiled the world before we died. There is nothing left. Nothing but dreams.

She looked where he was looking, into the dim gulf of air above the western sea. “If she comes, she'll come from there,” he said. “And if she doesn't come, she is there.” She nodded. “I know.” Her eyes were filled with tears.

The discovery brings him victory, the kind of victory that isn’t the end of a battle but the beginning of a life.

He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being.

things change: authors and wizards are not always to be trusted: nobody can explain a dragon.

I look at the world, at the forests and the mountains here, the sky, and it's all right, as it should be. But we aren't. People aren't. We're wrong. We do wrong. No animal does wrong. How could they? But we can, and we do. And we never stop.

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?

“Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?” From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.

We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society formed upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.

Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?

I use your love as a man burns a candle, burns it away, to light his steps.

Wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.

He was not interested in detached knowledge, science for science's sake: there was no use learning anything if it was of no use. Relevance was his touchstone.

The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

You must be Arha, or you must be Tenar. You cannot be both.

I was in too much haste, and now have no time left.

No one, no matter how strong or wise or great, can rightly own and use another.

Let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial.

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance.

Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part.

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

I think they drove your priestess Kossil mad a long time ago; I think she has prowled these caverns as she prowls the labyrinth of her own self, and now she cannot see the daylight any more.

She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.

Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.

In the room heavy with life he slept.

But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.

I know perfectly well he's a god, too. But what I think is, he'll be much godlier after he's dead.

Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.

She never saw why something could not be. Another reason he loved her.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their truth-telling to sentimental platitude.

Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.

And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.

Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.

I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?

She looked where he was looking, into the dim gulf of air above the western sea. “If she comes, she'll come from there,” he said. “And if she doesn't come, she is there.” She nodded. “I know.” Her eyes were filled with tears.

The discovery brings him victory, the kind of victory that isn’t the end of a battle but the beginning of a life.