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.
URSULA K. LE GUINThat selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?
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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
What 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.
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The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
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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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Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.
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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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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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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.
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The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.
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People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
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I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.
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Hope is a slow business.
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Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.
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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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We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.
URSULA K. LE GUIN