A panda walks into a tea room and ordered a salad and ate it. Then it pulled out a pistol, shot the man in the next table dead, and walked out.
URSULA K. LE GUINBut it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
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And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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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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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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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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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
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The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.
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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 will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.
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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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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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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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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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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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Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it.
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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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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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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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The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.
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Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
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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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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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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
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