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.
URSULA K. LE GUINWe live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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 -
Listen.’ For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
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The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
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And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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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It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.
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You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
URSULA K. LE GUIN






