We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
URSULA K. LE GUINSuccess is somebody else’s failure.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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Success is somebody else’s failure.
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.
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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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A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it.
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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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To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
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In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
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When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
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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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Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other–outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
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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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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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We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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