There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
URSULA K. LE GUINOur roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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Besides, when you say you’re a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it’s kind of irresistible.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.
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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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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
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Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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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Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.
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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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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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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?
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And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
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We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.
URSULA K. LE GUIN