Reading is performance. The reader–the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk–performs the work.
URSULA K. LE GUINThe world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world.
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We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.
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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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My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
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Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
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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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What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
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The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
URSULA K. LE GUIN