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.
URSULA K. LE GUINThe worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Listen.’ For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.
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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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You 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…
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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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Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
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While we read a novel, we are insane-bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices… Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
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Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.
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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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Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
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Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
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It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable.
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I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live.
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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:
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The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
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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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You can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
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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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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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I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.
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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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The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes.
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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN