If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.
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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It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.
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I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
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We read books to find out who we are.
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive.
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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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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.
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We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.
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A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it… By using words well they strengthen their souls.
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For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man’s toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.
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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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To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
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The presence of the trees was very strong…The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.
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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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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.
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The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
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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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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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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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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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Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.
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Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts.
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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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The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
URSULA K. LE GUIN