First sentences are doors to worlds.
URSULA K. LE GUINFreedom 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.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too.
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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
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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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If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
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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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Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic ‘libertarianism’ of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early.
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If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself.
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To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
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Life–evolution–the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy–existence itself–is essentially change.
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My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
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Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer’s first duty is to use language well.
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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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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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As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
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The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
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We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
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By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
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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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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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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
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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 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.
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What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat… where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.
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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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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN