The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, – this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
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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I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
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Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
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We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
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Reading is performance. The reader–the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk–performs the work.
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Hope is a slow business.
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But where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over.
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The creative adult is the child who has survived.
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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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I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live.
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You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…
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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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I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.
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Success is somebody else’s failure.
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What is life without incompatible realities?
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