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.
URSULA K. LE GUINEven 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.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
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Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.
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For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man’s toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.
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To hear, one must be silent.
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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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Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
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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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But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
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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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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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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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Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.
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If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.
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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN