But 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.
URSULA K. LE GUINOnce you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.
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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
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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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In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
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A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it… By using words well they strengthen their souls.
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A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart.
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To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
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When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
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Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
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Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice.
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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
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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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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
URSULA K. LE GUIN