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If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Age Future Gender Group Humanity Immense Next People Race Religion Surrounded World
I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Back Choice Give Lost Thing Waste World
Hope is a slow business.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Business Hope Slow
Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Capitalism Die Growth Imperative Interdependence Limit Odd Radical Stand
We read books to find out who we are.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Book Find Out Read
Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Delight Freedom Use Way Winter Word
Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Book Children Good Perfectly Well Real True Unicorn
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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Banker Believe Existence Hear Insane Novel People Raed Voice
To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Fiction Frfinition Imagination Imitation Invention Realistic Superior Think
By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Brighter Deeper Reader Skill Soul Spend Story Teller Strength Well Word
To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Choose Privilege
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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Build Own Prison Wall
I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Child Doubt Eggplant Eradicated Grow Imagination Suppressed
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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Help Living Middle See Story Well While
Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Absolute Freedom Responsibility
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

God No Proven Religion

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

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If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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