The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
URSULA K. LE GUINThere have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.
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You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities.
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Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice.
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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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What is life without incompatible realities?
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What good is music? None … and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, ‘
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A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it.
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You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.
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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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The presence of the trees was very strong…The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.
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The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
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The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
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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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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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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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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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As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music.
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A panda walks into a tea room and ordered a salad and ate it. Then it pulled out a pistol, shot the man in the next table dead, and walked out.
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When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
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To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
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The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
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If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself.
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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
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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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We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
URSULA K. LE GUIN