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.
URSULA K. LE GUINOdonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic ‘libertarianism’ of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
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You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities.
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But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet 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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As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.
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The 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.
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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.
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It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.
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Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too.
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Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this:
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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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Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.
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Hope is a slow business.
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We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
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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…
URSULA K. LE GUIN