Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts.
URSULA K. LE GUINThe book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
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Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.
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A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
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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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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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The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
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My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
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To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
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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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We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother.
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What good is music? None … and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, ‘
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It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
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That 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?
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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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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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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
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Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
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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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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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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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I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
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Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.
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Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other–outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
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I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own.
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The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
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