What good is music? None … and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, ‘
URSULA K. LE GUINThe question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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But where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over.
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Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
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as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
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The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
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But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
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All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
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A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
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The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
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This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars.
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The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive.
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The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
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Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.
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First sentences are doors to worlds.
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Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.
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The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
URSULA K. LE GUIN