As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.
URSULA K. LE GUINWell, 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.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
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A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart.
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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.
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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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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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Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice.
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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
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Life–evolution–the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy–existence itself–is essentially change.
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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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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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The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive.
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Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.
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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN