You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
URSULA K. LE GUINThe 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.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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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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The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
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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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A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
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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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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.
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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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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
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We 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 .
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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 had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
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I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world.
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Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
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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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Life–evolution–the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy–existence itself–is essentially change.
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The story is not in the plot but in the telling.
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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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What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
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We read books to find out who we are.
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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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Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice.
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When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
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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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This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars.
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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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