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.
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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It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
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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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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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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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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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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
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But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
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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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As men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation – you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality.
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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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People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
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Listen.’ For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.
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The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
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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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All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge.
URSULA K. LE GUIN