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.
URSULA K. LE GUINEvery 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.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
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Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.
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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 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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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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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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When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
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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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I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own.
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Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things.
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The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.
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We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.
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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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