The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.
URSULA K. LE GUINThose who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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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.
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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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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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as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
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Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.
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Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
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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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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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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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A panda walks into a tea room and ordered a salad and ate it. Then it pulled out a pistol, shot the man in the next table dead, and walked out.
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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
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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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To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
URSULA K. LE GUIN