What is life without incompatible realities?
URSULA K. LE GUINYou will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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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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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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Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it.
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I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
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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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A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it… By using words well they strengthen their souls.
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But where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over.
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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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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
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As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
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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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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.
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The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.
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If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from 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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I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.
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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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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.
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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
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We read books to find out who we are.
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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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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
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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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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
URSULA K. LE GUIN