Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
URSULA K. LE GUINThe trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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First sentences are doors to worlds.
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You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…
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The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
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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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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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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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Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
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You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
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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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As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
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I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
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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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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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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.
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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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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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Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.
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The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.
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Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.
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Hope is a slow business.
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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.
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It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
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By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
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We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN