Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Dark, Thinking, Night

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.11, Ultramarine Publishing

• Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer's first duty is to use language well.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Lying, Confusion, Needs

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1998). “Steering the craft: exercises and discussions on story writing for the lone navigator or the mutinous crew”, The Eighth Mountain Press

• 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; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Fall, Clouds, Wind

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “A Wizard of Earthsea”, p.40, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Communication, Men, Dumb

  A Left-Handed Commencement Address, delivered 22 May 1983, Mills College, Oakland, California

• There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Mother, Baby, Father

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2008). “Lavinia”, p.193, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• I've got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin's not easy.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Latin, Language, Easy

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