The story is not in the plot but in the telling.
URSULA K. LE GUINThe 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.
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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The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows.
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What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat… where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.
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My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
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Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
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Life–evolution–the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy–existence itself–is essentially change.
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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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I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
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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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No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
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What is life without incompatible realities?
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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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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN