We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
URSULA K. LE GUINAs great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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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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You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.
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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.
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Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.
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It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.
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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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Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other–outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
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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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The story is not in the plot but in the telling.
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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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As men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation – you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality.
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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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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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And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.
URSULA K. LE GUIN






