We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
URSULA K. LE GUINThere are no right answers to wrong questions.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
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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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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
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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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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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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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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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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 need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people .
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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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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
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What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
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Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts.
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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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Success is somebody else’s failure.
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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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To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
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Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy?
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People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
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Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.
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To hear, one must be silent.
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If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. …But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.
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What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat… where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.
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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.
URSULA K. LE GUIN