Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer’s first duty is to use language well.
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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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’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 book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries.
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Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
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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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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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The light is the left hand of darkness.
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The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, – this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
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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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Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic ‘libertarianism’ of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early.
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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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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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When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
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You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities.
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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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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.
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f we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we’ll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival.
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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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The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows.
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Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
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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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I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.
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We read books to find out who we are.
URSULA K. LE GUIN