We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.
URSULA K. LE GUINWriters know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it.
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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
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To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
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You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
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Every group we belong to – by gender, sex, race, religion, age – is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.
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Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic ‘libertarianism’ of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early.
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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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By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
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Hope is a slow business.
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Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.
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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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The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, – this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
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A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN