as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
URSULA K. LE GUINYou 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.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
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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 question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
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I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live.
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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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A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
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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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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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Life–evolution–the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy–existence itself–is essentially change.
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The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
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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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All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge.
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
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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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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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The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
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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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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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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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The story is not in the plot but in the telling.
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We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.
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Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.
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Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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 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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN