The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, – this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
URSULA K. LE GUINResistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art – the art of words.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.
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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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The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
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The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
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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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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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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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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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Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit.
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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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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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To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.
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I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
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We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
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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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I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own.
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My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
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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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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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The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
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It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
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We are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.
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What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
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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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Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.
URSULA K. LE GUIN