Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
URSULA K. LE GUINLying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too.
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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To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
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We are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.
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Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
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You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
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A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
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You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…
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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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What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat… where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.
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Life–evolution–the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy–existence itself–is essentially change.
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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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To hear, one must be silent.
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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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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN