The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive.
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.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
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Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
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It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
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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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The 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.
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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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I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
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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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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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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 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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as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
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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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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
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But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN