The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
URSULA K. LE GUINI never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
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You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
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Those 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.
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I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
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You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.
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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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Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other–outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
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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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What is life without incompatible realities?
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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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There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
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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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We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
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Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.
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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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The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
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Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer’s first duty is to use language well.
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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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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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Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.
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The presence of the trees was very strong…The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.
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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.
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First sentences are doors to worlds.
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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?
URSULA K. LE GUIN