There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
URSULA K. LE GUINThe mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things.
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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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The light is the left hand of darkness.
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If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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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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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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 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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You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities.
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My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.
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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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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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Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.
URSULA K. LE GUIN