Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
URSULA K. LE GUINThe dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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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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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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The presence of the trees was very strong…The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
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Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison.
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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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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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As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music.
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First sentences are doors to worlds.
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Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy?
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The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
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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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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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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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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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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 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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Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.
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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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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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There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
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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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A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
URSULA K. LE GUIN