The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
URSULA K. LE GUINTo 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.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Hope is a slow business.
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A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
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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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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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The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
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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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The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
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It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
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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.
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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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I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world.
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As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.
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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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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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When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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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.
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Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.
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I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
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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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We read books to find out who we are.
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The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries.
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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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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.
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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN