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.
URSULA K. LE GUINWhen the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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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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We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.
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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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For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man’s toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.
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If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.
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To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.
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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 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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It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.
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Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.
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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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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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As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
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A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
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To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
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We read books to find out who we are.
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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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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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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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The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive.
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Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
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The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.
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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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What is life without incompatible realities?
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Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
URSULA K. LE GUIN