The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
URSULA K. LE GUINYou sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
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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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No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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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.
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It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.
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It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
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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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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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Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
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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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You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
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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.
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I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world.
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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN