I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
URSULA K. LE GUINI had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.
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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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The light is the left hand of darkness.
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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
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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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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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Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.
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You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.
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The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.
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I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
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Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
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But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
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If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. …But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.
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Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic ‘libertarianism’ of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early.
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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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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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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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.
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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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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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The creative adult is the child who has survived.
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It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
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Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
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As men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation – you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality.
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Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
URSULA K. LE GUIN