As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music.
URSULA K. LE GUINIf 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.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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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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We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
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If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
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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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While we read a novel, we are insane-bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices… Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
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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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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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Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this:
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I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own.
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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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We read books to find out who we are.
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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.
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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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Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit.
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Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
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Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it.
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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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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 maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.
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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 is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation.
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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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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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Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
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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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