My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
URSULA K. LE GUINChildren know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
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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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Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
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Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
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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.
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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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Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
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There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
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Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art – the art of words.
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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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Well, we think that time “passes,” flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see.
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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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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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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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If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. …But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.
URSULA K. LE GUIN






