And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.
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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What good is music? None … and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, ‘
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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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Every group we belong to – by gender, sex, race, religion, age – is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.
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All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
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To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
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The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
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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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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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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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We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
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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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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them.
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We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.
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But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
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We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.
URSULA K. LE GUIN