The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
URSULA K. LE GUINAll makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…
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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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The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.
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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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All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
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The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
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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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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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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.
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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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There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
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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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The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
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The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.
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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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Listen.’ For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.
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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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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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To hear, one must be silent.
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Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
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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.
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.
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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
URSULA K. LE GUIN