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.
URSULA K. LE GUINI never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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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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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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Listen.’ For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.
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Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit.
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Life–evolution–the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy–existence itself–is essentially change.
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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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I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
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You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
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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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Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other–outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
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Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.
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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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The presence of the trees was very strong…The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.
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as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
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