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.
URSULA K. LE GUINAny 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.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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The light is the left hand of darkness.
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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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Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
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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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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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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
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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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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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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
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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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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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It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
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A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it.
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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN