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.
URSULA K. LE GUINAbsolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
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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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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
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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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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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You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
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Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
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Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things.
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Listen.’ For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.
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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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We are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.
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People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
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There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
URSULA K. LE GUIN