We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
URSULA K. LE GUINEven with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer’s first duty is to use language well.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
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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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We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
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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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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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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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A panda walks into a tea room and ordered a salad and ate it. Then it pulled out a pistol, shot the man in the next table dead, and walked out.
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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
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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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Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.
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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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It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.
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Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
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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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It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
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Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison.
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The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries.
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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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Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
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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 creative adult is the child who has survived.
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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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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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To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
URSULA K. LE GUIN