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There’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.

Ursula K. Le Guin

If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Affinity Another Declare Deny Different Person Yourself
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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Chance Come Evade Fulfill Home Joy May Pleasure Suffer
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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Fantasy Height Realistic Reality Surrealistic Traditional
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Book Essential Feel Find Guide Imaginary Ourselves Out People Real Think Understanding
The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

End Goes Light never Reach Road Towards Traveler Upward
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Anything Art Else Entirely Fell Increasingly Itself Mysterious Translate Translation Writing
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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Aspect Civilization Denied Fear Form Institutionalize Know Male Misogyny Shape
All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Anotherrmone Knowledge Local Partial Truth Untrue
The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Book Compact Complex Crucial Device Efficiency Extremely Itself Little Look Often Pleasant Shown Technology
We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Adapt Appetite Control Destroy Fast Ourselves Violence World
Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Moment Nothing Remark River Same Step Twice
I 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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Alternative Come Fear Hard See Society Stricken Think Through Time Voice Want Will Writer
Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Country Dark Earth Root
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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Build Own Prison Wall
as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Bought Free Freedom Fresh Loneliness Solitude Writer
Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Awake Courahege Injustice Make Rule

There’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.

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There’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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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