What is life without incompatible realities?
URSULA K. LE GUINIt’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.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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.
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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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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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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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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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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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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 mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes.
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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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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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When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
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The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, – this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
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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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We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
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To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
URSULA K. LE GUIN