If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.
URSULA K. LE GUINHate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries.
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No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
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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 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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I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
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Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it.
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Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison.
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But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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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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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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN