Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer’s first duty is to use language well.
URSULA K. LE GUINThere’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
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A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it… By using words well they strengthen their souls.
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If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
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We are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.
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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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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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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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Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
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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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Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice.
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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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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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It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
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We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
URSULA K. LE GUIN