A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
URSULA K. LE GUINBut where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes.
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Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
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We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
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If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
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To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
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To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
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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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The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
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Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
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What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
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Well, we think that time “passes,” flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see.
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The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive.
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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 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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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 GUIN