And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend's voice arises, and how a real love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?

— Ursula K. Le Guin

And not only narrative but the quality of the writing is of the first importance to me. Rightly or not, I believe a dull, inept style signals poverty or incompleteness of thought. I see the accuracy, scope, and quality of Darwin’s intellect directly expressed in the clarity, strength, and vitality of his writing — the beauty of it.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet I would remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

An Oxonian’s goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

An Oxonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or a soap-works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn't work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscience.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

A people that doesn't live at the center of the world, as defined and described by its poets and storytellers, is in a bad way. The center of the world is where you live fully, where you know how things are done, how things are done rightly, done well.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Do pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One's freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one's own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

A psychopathy on Andres was rational behavior on Arras.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

As a boy, Orion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wizard he had learned the price of the game, which is the peril of losing one's self, playing away the truth. The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater this peril. Every prentice-sorcerer learns the tale of the wizard Border of Way, who delighted in taking bear's shape, and did so more and more often until the bear grew in him and the man died away, and he became a bear, and killed his own little son in the forests, and was hunted down and slain. And no one knows how many of the dolphins that leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name in the joy of the restless sea.

— Ursula K. Le Guin