As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
URSULA K. LE GUINThe unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Well, we think that time “passes,” flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see.
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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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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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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.
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As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music.
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To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
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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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Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
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Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.
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A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
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To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.
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All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge.
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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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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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It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable.
URSULA K. LE GUIN