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.
URSULA K. LE GUINI think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.
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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There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation.
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We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
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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.
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To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.
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Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.
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I 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.
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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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If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself.
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Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic ‘libertarianism’ of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early.
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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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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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The 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.
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You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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