Wit & Attitude Quote by Ursula K. Le Guin

Imagination, for Le Guin, is less a glittering superpower than a split-level existence: it “makes me human,” then immediately “makes me a fool.” That pivot is the whole trick. She refuses the usual cultural script where imagination equals virtue or escape. Instead, she frames it as the organ that produces empathy and also the mechanism that guarantees disappointment. To imagine is to keep comparing reality to what could be, and that comparison can look like wisdom or like naivete depending on who’s judging.

The line’s engine is its pairing of abundance with banishment. “It gives me all the world” suggests the writer’s godlike access: whole civilizations, private motives, alternate histories. Then the sentence yanks the ladder away: imagination “exiles me from it.” Le Guin’s subtext is social as much as psychological. The imaginative person doesn’t just daydream; they see the constructed nature of norms, borders, gender roles, power. That vision can widen compassion, but it can also make ordinary participation feel like bad theater. You can’t fully “belong” to a world you’re constantly reimagining.

Context matters: Le Guin built a career on speculative fiction that treats invention as a tool for anthropology, not spectacle. Her books repeatedly ask what it costs to see differently and to care across difference. This quote compresses that ethic into a single paradox: imagination is the gateway to connection and the price of estrangement. It’s a writer’s credo with a sting in it, warning that the same faculty that creates worlds can quietly unmake your membership in the one you live in.