The light is the left hand of darkness.
URSULA K. LE GUINIf you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
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If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. …But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.
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Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
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The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries.
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While we read a novel, we are insane-bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices… Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
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When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
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All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
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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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A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
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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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To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
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What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
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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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To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
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What is life without incompatible realities?
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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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Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.
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My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died.
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You can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
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The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows.
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First sentences are doors to worlds.
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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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Well, we think that time “passes,” flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see.
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Life–evolution–the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy–existence itself–is essentially change.
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The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
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There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
URSULA K. LE GUIN