Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art – the art of words.
URSULA K. LE GUINAll of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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What good is music? None … and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, ‘
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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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Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts.
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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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The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
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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.
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I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world.
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Besides, when you say you’re a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it’s kind of irresistible.
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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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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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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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For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man’s toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.
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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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Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
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In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
URSULA K. LE GUIN