Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness” Quotes (27 Quotes)

At the pit's bottom is no anger.

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.

Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.

Sometimes you must go against the wheel's turn.

Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

The life of every man is in the Center of Time, for all were seen in the seeing of Meshe, and are in his eye. We are the pupils of his Eye... Our doing is his Seeing: our being is his Knowing.

Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion.

The light is the left hand of darkness

How does one hate a country, or love one?... I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is the love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing.

The machine conceals the machinations.

I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved nothing except perhaps a rather subtler point.

There is neither source nor end, for all things are in the Center of Time. As all the stars may be reflected in a round raindrop falling in the night: so too do all the stars reflect the raindrop. There is neither darkness nor death, for all things are, in the Light of the Moment, and their end and their beginning are one.

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. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.

I tried to speak insipidly, yet everything I said seemed to take on a double meaning.

This story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed, I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them is false, and it is all one story.

If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.

I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

Truth is a matter of the imagination.

It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.

Man's singularity is his divinity.

No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.

Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies...

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

Progress means nothing to presence.