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 GUINWe cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy?
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We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.
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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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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.
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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
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Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it.
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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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But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
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It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
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It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
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It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.
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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.
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Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.
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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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A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it.
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We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
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Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
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You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities.
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Reading is performance. The reader–the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk–performs the work.
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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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Every group we belong to – by gender, sex, race, religion, age – is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.
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You can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
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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.
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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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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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Hope is a slow business.
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