I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
URSULA K. LE GUINWhat sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
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Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
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That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?
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We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people .
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Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.
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I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.
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Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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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, ‘
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Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
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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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By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
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Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic ‘libertarianism’ of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early.
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Success is somebody else’s failure.
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A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it… By using words well they strengthen their souls.
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Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice.
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.
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My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died.
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People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
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Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy?
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The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.
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I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.
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Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.
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To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
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A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
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