Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes About Children

Quotes about: Children

• The creative adult is the child who has survived.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Creativity, Imagination

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2017). “No Time to Spare: Thinking about what Matters”, p.120, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Mother, Children, Growing Up

  "The Dispossessed". Book by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974.

• 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

• I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Growing Up, Eggplant

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.42, Ultramarine Publishing

• Reading is performance. The reader--the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk--performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Reading, Men

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2004). “The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination”, p.143, Shambhala Publications

• As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Compassion, Grieving

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.58, Ultramarine Publishing

• The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Grateful, Revolution

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.107, Grove Press

• For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Dragons, Challenges

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

• What children don't understand, and can't understand until they grow up some, is how much the whole fabric and process of human society depends on everybody agreeing to ignore, most of the time, the fact that all of us are, most of the time, inadequate, incompetent, pitiful, and, in fact, naked to our enemies. None of us really has very much in the way of spiritual, moral clothing. We dress ourselves in rags. And we agree to say nothing about it. To a very large extent, it is human charity that clothes us.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Spiritual, Children, Growing Up

• I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Growing Up, Believe

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

• I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Imagination, Stories

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.131, Ultramarine Publishing

• It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Stars, Children, Distance

  "Transcript for the Piece Audio version of A Wizard of Earthsea: A Big Read Documentary". www.prx.org.

• There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Wall, Real

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2009). “The Dispossessed”, p.6, Harper Collins

• I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners - almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women... women tend to eat less... It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Men, Vocabulary

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “The Left Hand Of Darkness”, p.149, Hachette UK

• If women had power, what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?" "Hah!" went Tenar; and presently, with some cunning, she said, "Haven't there been queens? Weren't they women of power?" "A queen's only a she-king," said Ged. She snorted. "I mean, men give her power. They let her use their power. But it isn't hers, is it? It isn't because she's a woman that she's powerful, but despite it.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Kings, Queens, Children

• What is a woman's power then?" she asked. "I don't think we know." "When has a woman power because she's a woman? With her children, I suppose. For a while..." "In her house, maybe." She looked around the kitchen. "But the doors are shut," she said, "the doors are locked." "Because you're valuable." "Oh yes. We're precious. So long as we're powerless.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Thinking, Doors

  Ursula K. LeGuin (2015). “Tehanu: The Fourth Book of Earthsea”, p.90, Hachette UK

• As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Powerful, Wish

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Todd Barton, Margaret Chodos-Irvine, George Hersh (1985). “Always Coming Home”, p.29, Univ of California Press

• 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 safer for children to grow up in.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Country, Running, Baby

  The Lathe of Heaven ch. 6 (1971)

• If we can get that realistic feminine morality working for us, if we can trust ourselves and so let women think and feel that an unwanted child or an oversize family is wrong -- not ethically wrong, not against the rules, but morally wrong, all wrong, wrong like a thalidomide birth, wrong like taking a wrong step that will break your neck -- if we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we'll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Thinking, Survival

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2017). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.31, Grove Press

• I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Growing Up, Believe

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

• 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.

• No matter how successful, beloved, influential her work was, when a woman author dies, nine times out of ten, she gets dropped from the lists, the courses, the anthologies, while the men get kept. ... If she had the nerve to have children, her chances of getting dropped are higher still. ... So if you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Suicide, Children, Taken

  "Prospects for Women in Writing" (speech), Portland, Me., Sept. 1986

• My Real Children starts quietly, then suddenly takes you on two roller-coaster rides at once, swooping dizzily through a double panorama and ending in a sort of super Sophie's Choice. A daring tour de force.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Real, Two

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