Ursula K. Le Guin Light Quotations

Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?

It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself ... both and one. A shadow on snow.

It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.

The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.

I went to the springs while the sun was still up, and sitting on a rocky outcrop above the cave mouth I watched the light grow reddish across the misty pools, and listened to the troubled voice of the water. After a while I moved farther up the hill, where I could hear birds singing near and far in the silence of the trees. The presence of the trees was very strong...The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.

When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.

To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place.

Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.

Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.

The light is the left hand of darkness

Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not every planet can do it; it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun's first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumberable wind-stirred branches.

The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness.