We read books to find out who we are.
URSULA K. LE GUINWe read books to find out who we are.
URSULA K. LE GUINWe 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 .
URSULA K. LE GUINYou cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
URSULA K. LE GUINGrieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.
URSULA K. LE GUINTo be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
URSULA K. LE GUINWe’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
URSULA K. LE GUINA child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart.
URSULA K. LE GUINBut it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
URSULA K. LE GUINOnly pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
URSULA K. LE GUINThere have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
URSULA K. LE GUINWe live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
URSULA K. LE GUINThose who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.
URSULA K. LE GUINThere is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation.
URSULA K. LE GUINWe cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
URSULA K. LE GUINI believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.
URSULA K. LE GUINAll makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN