We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother.
URSULA K. LE GUINReading is performance. The reader–the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk–performs the work.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.
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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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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.
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That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?
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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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Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
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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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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.
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I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
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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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To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
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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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Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.
URSULA K. LE GUIN