You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities.
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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My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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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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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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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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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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We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
f we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we’ll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival.
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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
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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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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN