Ursula K. Le Guin

I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

Mr. Ai, we’ve seen the same events with different eyes; I wrongly thought they’d seem the same to us.

He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell.

It seemed, at least, that they had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.

Men who fight wars in Winter don’t live till Spring.

The more defensive a society, the more conformist.

He liked the vast openness of sky and prairie, and found loneliness a pleasure with so immense a domain to be alone in.

He detested them for forcing helplessness upon him.

Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.

The game must be played, and played their way, though they made all the rules and had all the skill. His ineptitude did not matter. His honesty did. He was staked now totally on one belief: that an honest man cannot be cheated, that truth, if the game be played through right to the end, will lead to truth.

The juniper-scented liquor had volatilized his thoughts; he should be thinking that madness caused this man to call himself a king, but was thinking rather that kingship had driven this man mad.

We live well in the houses—well enough. But we are ruled utterly by fear. There was a time we sailed in ships between the stars, and now we dare not go a hundred miles from home. We keep a little knowledge, and do nothing with it. But once we used that knowledge to weave the pattern of life like a tapestry across night and chaos. We enlarged the chances of life. We did man’s work.