The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
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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The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.
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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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To hear, one must be silent.
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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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We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people .
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The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.
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You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…
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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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Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer’s first duty is to use language well.
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Hope is a slow business.
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No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
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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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To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
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My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died.
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I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.
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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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It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
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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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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
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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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The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
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It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting 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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There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.
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It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable.
URSULA K. LE GUIN