When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
URSULA K. LE GUINThe danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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But where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over.
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This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars.
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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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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?
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Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too.
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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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You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
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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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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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The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
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There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
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A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
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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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Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN