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.
URSULA K. LE GUINFor all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man’s toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.
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The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
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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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A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
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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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But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
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There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
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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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Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other–outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
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I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
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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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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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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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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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What is life without incompatible realities?
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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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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.
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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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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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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 only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.
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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.
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Every group we belong to – by gender, sex, race, religion, age – is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.
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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
URSULA K. LE GUIN