Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Inspirational, Real, Book

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.31, Ultramarine Publishing

• Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Contentment, Amazon

  "Ursula K Le Guin launches broadside on Amazon's 'sell it fast, sell it cheap' policy" by Marta Bausells, www.theguardian.com. June 3, 2015.

• The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Eye, Technology

• The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.198, Grove Press

• As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Soul, Feelings

• Well, we think that time "passes," flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Time, Moving, Book

• If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Reading, Fifteen

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2016). “Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a WriterÕs Week”, p.77, Small Beer Press

• Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Real, Book

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.44, Ultramarine Publishing

• While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Believe, Book, Voice

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.157, Ultramarine Publishing

• After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Writing, Men

• Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long time ago. There is this terrific book that has changed your life, and then you meet the author, and he has shifty eyes and funny shoes and he won't talk about anything except the injustice of the United States income tax structure toward people with fluctuating income, or how to breed Black Angus cows, or something.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Writing, Eye

• We read books to find out who we are.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Discovery, Self Understanding

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.31, Ultramarine Publishing

• Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Return, Sanity

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.9, Penguin

• The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Airports, Reactions

• If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, like the center of the Square, it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern. You saw the foundations of the world. And they were solid.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Numbers, Squares

• I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two people. What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery. So I wrote this book for my friend, with whom I have lived and will die free.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Men, Doors

• You know, I don't think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn't. Probably because I don't want to start thinking, "Am I popular?" I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, School, Thinking

• Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Book, Writing

  "A Message About Messages". Personal website, www.ursulakleguin.com.

• A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Demand, Assumption

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination”, p.197, Shambhala Publications

• I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Reading, Mind

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.7, Grove Press

• I have become very critical of the whole book award system and could preach on that subject for quite a while, but I do know what an award can mean to a writer early in her career. It can give an essential validation.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Mean, Careers

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• By and large books are mankind's best invention.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Invention, Mankind

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