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.
URSULA K. LE GUINSafety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this:
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
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Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
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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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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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Success is somebody else’s failure.
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Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
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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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It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
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Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
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I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
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Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison.
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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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Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy?
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And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.
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The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, – this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
URSULA K. LE GUIN