The light is the left hand of darkness.
URSULA K. LE GUINThe creative adult is the child who has survived.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music.
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By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
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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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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
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Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit.
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We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.
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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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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.
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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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While we read a novel, we are insane-bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices… Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
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You can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
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I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
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To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
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People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
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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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What is life without incompatible realities?
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Besides, when you say you’re a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it’s kind of irresistible.
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Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
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I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.
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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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I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
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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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Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too.
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The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.
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No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
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The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
URSULA K. LE GUIN