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.
URSULA K. LE GUINWe controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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You can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
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When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
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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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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.
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You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
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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.
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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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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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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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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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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other–outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
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And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.
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The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
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The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
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To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
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Hope is a slow business.
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A panda walks into a tea room and ordered a salad and ate it. Then it pulled out a pistol, shot the man in the next table dead, and walked out.
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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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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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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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.
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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN