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.
URSULA K. LE GUINBefore the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.
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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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Success is somebody else’s failure.
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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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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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The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
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I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
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Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.
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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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It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable.
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There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation.
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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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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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I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
URSULA K. LE GUIN






