The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
URSULA K. LE GUINA writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it… By using words well they strengthen their souls.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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The story is not in the plot but in the telling.
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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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I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own.
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That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?
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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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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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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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Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
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I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
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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.
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We read books to find out who we are.
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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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A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
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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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Reading is performance. The reader–the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk–performs the work.
URSULA K. LE GUIN