Reading is performance. The reader–the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk–performs the work.
URSULA K. LE GUINWe 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 .
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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We read books to find out who we are.
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What is life without incompatible realities?
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Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
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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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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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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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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.
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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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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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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.
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The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive.
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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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Life–evolution–the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy–existence itself–is essentially change.
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We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
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Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice.
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