Quote of the Day (Ursula Le Guin, on Her Imagination)

“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.”— American science-fiction author Ursula Le Guin (1929-2018), "The Creatures on My Mind" in Unlocking the Air and Other Stories (1996)

Quote of the Day (Ursula Le Guin, on Writers Who Can ‘Imagine Real Grounds for Hope’)

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.”—Sci-fi author Ursula Le Guin (1929-2018), “Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters,” Nov. 19, 2014

Quote of the Day (Ursula Le Guin, With Inspiration for the Day)

“Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.”— American sci-fi/fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), “Science Fiction and the Future,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (2017)

Quote of the Day (Ursula K. Le Guin, on ‘The Sound of the Language’)

“The sound of the language is where it all begins. The test of a sentence is, Does it sound right? The basic elements of language are physical: the noise words make, the sounds and silences that make the rhythms marking their relationships. Both the meaning and the beauty of the writing depend on these sounds and rhythms.”—Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (1998)

Quote of the Day (Ursula Le Guin, on the Imagination as a Means of Becoming Human)

“Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit making. It is not a weapon, though all weapons originate from it, and the use, or nonuse, of all weapons depends on it, as with all tools and their uses.  The imagination is a fundamental way of thinking, an essential means of becoming and remaining human. It is a tool of the mind.”—Science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (2004)