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.
URSULA K. LE GUINWhat 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.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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What good is music? None … and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, ‘
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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 need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.
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I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
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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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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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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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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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I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
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If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself.
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Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
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Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.
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I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own.
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Besides, when you say you’re a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it’s kind of irresistible.
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