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.
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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Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts.
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All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge.
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Reading is performance. The reader–the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk–performs the work.
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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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To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
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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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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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Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it.
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I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.
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A panda walks into a tea room and ordered a salad and ate it. Then it pulled out a pistol, shot the man in the next table dead, and walked out.
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Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.
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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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It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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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