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?
URSULA K. LE GUINAs 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.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.
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Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison.
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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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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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The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
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Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
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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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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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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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I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
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A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
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While we read a novel, we are insane-bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices… Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
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We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother.
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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
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The light is the left hand of darkness.
URSULA K. LE GUIN