To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
URSULA K. LE GUINWhen the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
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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Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.
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Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
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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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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things.
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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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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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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 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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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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The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
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You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
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Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too.
URSULA K. LE GUIN