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.
URSULA K. LE GUINA writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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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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What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
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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.
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But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
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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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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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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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Every group we belong to – by gender, sex, race, religion, age – is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.
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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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Well, we think that time “passes,” flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see.
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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
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But where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over.
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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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Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
URSULA K. LE GUIN