We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.
URSULA K. LE GUINWe will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music.
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The presence of the trees was very strong…The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.
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Those 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.
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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
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The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows.
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My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
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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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Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit.
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As men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation – you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality.
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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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We are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.
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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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I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.
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Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
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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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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.
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There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
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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 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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You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
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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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You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.
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I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world.
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Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison.
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It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.
URSULA K. LE GUIN