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.
URSULA K. LE GUINIf 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.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
-
-
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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy?
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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, ‘
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Success is somebody else’s failure.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN