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.
URSULA K. LE GUINFreedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation.
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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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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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That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?
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Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
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The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes.
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To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.
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We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
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There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
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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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We read books to find out who we are.
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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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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.
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To hear, one must be silent.
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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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We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
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Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it.
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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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Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.
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Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art – the art of words.
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The creative adult is the child who has survived.
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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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The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
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A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart.
URSULA K. LE GUIN