top of page

"But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Experience quotes

"All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it."

"Observing and commenting, it is a piece of cake.Experiencing and sharing, that is a piece of work."

"Now that he wanted to feel like he was having a bad dream, he wasn't. He was having a bad reality, and that was something from which you could not wake."

"To 'live' is to realize that without the journey the destination is nothing more than a task rigorously completed rather than an experience riotously lived."

"Perfume counters in department stores, Holly Deblin smells of, the middle of July, and cinnamon Tic Tacs."

"I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think."

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it."

"Vanya soon found that America might be an exciting place to arrive, but living there could become, in time, as boring as anything else."

"Any experience can be transformed into something of value."
Explore more quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin


"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."


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


"He copulated with a number of girls, but copulation was not the joy it ought to be. It was a mere relief of need, like evacuating, and he felt ashamed of it afterward because it involved another person as object."


"Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass."


"Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone."


"The Sun Going SouthIn late sunshine I wander troubled.Restless I wander in autumn sunlight.Too many changes, partings, and deaths.Doors have closed that were always open.Trees that held the sky up are cut down.So much that I alone remember!This creek runs dry among its stones.Souls of the dead, come drink this water!Come into this side valley with me,a restless old woman, unseemly,troubled, walking on dry grass, dry stones."


"The universe as a giant harpstring, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from the Numerical Harmonies, I supposed?"


"Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it - because they're afraid of it. They're afraid of dragons. They have Smaugophobia. "Oh those awful Orcs," they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they'll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they'll have to redefine what literature is. And they're too damned lazy to do it."


"When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are."
bottom of page