Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this:
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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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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The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
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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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If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.
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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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I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.
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Hope is a slow business.
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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
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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.
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The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.
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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 live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
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I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
URSULA K. LE GUIN