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.
URSULA K. LE GUINI don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
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First sentences are doors to worlds.
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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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What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat… where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.
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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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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 life without incompatible realities?
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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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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A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
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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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Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this:
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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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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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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
URSULA K. LE GUIN