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.
URSULA K. LE GUINA wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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Hope is a slow business.
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And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.
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We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.
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The creative adult is the child who has survived.
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Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
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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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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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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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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
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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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The light is the left hand of darkness.
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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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I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
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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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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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If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.
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Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
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A panda walks into a tea room and ordered a salad and ate it. Then it pulled out a pistol, shot the man in the next table dead, and walked out.
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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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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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If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself.
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Success is somebody else’s failure.
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Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
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As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
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