As men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation – you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality.
URSULA K. LE GUINAs 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.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
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Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too.
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The story is not in the plot but in the telling.
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That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?
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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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Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.
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We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
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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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I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
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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.
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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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I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.
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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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We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother.
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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN