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 GUINEither we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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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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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, ‘
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I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
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I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
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First sentences are doors to worlds.
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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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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.
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You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.
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This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars.
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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.
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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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I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.
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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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You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.
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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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We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
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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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There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation.
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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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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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Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
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Life–evolution–the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy–existence itself–is essentially change.
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Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.
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Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
URSULA K. LE GUIN