And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.
URSULA K. LE GUINThe end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.
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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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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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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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The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
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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.
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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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A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.
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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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I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
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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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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
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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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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.
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My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
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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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To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
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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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Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
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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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It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.
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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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Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.
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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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Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.
URSULA K. LE GUIN