You can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
URSULA K. LE GUINThe light is the left hand of darkness.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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 -
I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…
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To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
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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.
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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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 -
To hear, one must be silent.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
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.
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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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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN -
A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart.
URSULA K. LE GUIN