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.
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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To hear, one must be silent.
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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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Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
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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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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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Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
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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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We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.
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The creative adult is the child who has survived.
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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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I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
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And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.
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No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
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We are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.
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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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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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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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I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own.
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All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
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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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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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As men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation – you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality.
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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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I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
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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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For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man’s toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.
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