We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people .
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.
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Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
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If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.
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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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You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
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I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
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In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
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The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
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What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
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If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself.
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If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. …But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.
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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 road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
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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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We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.
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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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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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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.
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Besides, when you say you’re a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it’s kind of irresistible.
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Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice.
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The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
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Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
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That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?
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A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart.
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Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN