It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable.
URSULA K. LE GUINI can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it.
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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this:
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The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.
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If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
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To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
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The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
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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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Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too.
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The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.
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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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Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
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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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Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit.
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No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
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You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities.
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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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If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself.
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The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.
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It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.
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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.
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The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
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I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
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