The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
URSULA K. LE GUINThe dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.
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The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
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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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I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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Success is somebody else’s failure.
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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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My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
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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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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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Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
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The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things.
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I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
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People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
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The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, – this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
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Life–evolution–the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy–existence itself–is essentially change.
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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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I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
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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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It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable.
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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
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Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.
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Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN