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.
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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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.
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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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Life–evolution–the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy–existence itself–is essentially change.
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Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
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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.
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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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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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This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars.
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While we read a novel, we are insane-bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices… Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
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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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When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
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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.
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A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
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Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.
URSULA K. LE GUIN






