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 GUINI doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
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We read books to find out who we are.
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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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Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
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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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What is life without incompatible realities?
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The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
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By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
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as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
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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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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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The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.
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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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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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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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A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
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Hope is a slow business.
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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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The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows.
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When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
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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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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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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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The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.
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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN