When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
URSULA K. LE GUINWhat 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.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Hope is a slow business.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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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It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable.
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I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.
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I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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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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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The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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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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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The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
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The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.
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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN