To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
URSULA K. LE GUINI certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
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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 cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
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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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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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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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It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable.
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We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
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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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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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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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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN