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.
URSULA K. LE GUINNobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.
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A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
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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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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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As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.
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Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
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It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.
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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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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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What good is music? None … and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, ‘
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To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
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Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.
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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
URSULA K. LE GUIN