We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
URSULA K. LE GUINThe 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.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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To hear, one must be silent.
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I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
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People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
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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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It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable.
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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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You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
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All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge.
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And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.
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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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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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We read books to find out who we are.
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That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?
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Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.
URSULA K. LE GUIN