I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.
URSULA K. LE GUINFirst sentences are doors to worlds.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit.
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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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Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.
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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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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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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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The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.
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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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All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
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The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
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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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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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What good is music? None … and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, ‘
URSULA K. LE GUIN