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.
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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Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things.
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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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You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
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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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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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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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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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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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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
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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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Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this:
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You can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
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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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You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN