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.
URSULA K. LE GUINWe will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
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I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own.
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Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
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The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.
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We are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.
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Every group we belong to – by gender, sex, race, religion, age – is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.
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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 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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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit.
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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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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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I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
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Hope is a slow business.
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And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.
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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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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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My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died.
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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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Listen.’ For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.
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To hear, one must be silent.
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Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.
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To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
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Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison.
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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.
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Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
URSULA K. LE GUIN