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.
URSULA K. LE GUINMen call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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 road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
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I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live.
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I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.
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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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As 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.
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What is life without incompatible realities?
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Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things.
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What good is music? None … and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, ‘
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A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it… By using words well they strengthen their souls.
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We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.
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The light is the left hand of darkness.
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To hear, one must be silent.
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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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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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All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge.
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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.
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Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this:
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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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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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To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
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It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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Reading is performance. The reader–the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk–performs the work.
URSULA K. LE GUIN