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:
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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When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
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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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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.
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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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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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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
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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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We read books to find out who we are.
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It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
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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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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.
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Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
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There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
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Success is somebody else’s failure.
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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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Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
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Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy?
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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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We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
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What is life without incompatible realities?
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We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother.
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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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The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
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Life–evolution–the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy–existence itself–is essentially change.
URSULA K. LE GUIN