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…
URSULA K. LE GUINWe’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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 can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
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Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
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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.
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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 question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
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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 important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.
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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
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You can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
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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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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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The light is the left hand of darkness.
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To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
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Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
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Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice.
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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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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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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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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
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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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This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars.
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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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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN