If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself.
URSULA K. LE GUINThe danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
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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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I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
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It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.
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Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.
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For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man’s toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.
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Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
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And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.
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The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
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I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
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When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
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A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it… By using words well they strengthen their souls.
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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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Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy?
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Grieving, 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 GUIN