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 GUINWe cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. …But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.
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As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music.
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We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
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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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We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
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I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
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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.
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A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
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Reading is performance. The reader–the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk–performs the work.
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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.
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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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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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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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Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN