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.
URSULA K. LE GUINWe are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
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The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
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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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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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No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
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My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died.
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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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To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
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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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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.
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Listen.’ For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.
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For 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.
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The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
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Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit.
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When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
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The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
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In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
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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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I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
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The light is the left hand of darkness.
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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.
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What good is music? None … and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, ‘
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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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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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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.
URSULA K. LE GUIN