Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Excess is excrement.
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You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes - the wall, the wall!
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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If I don’t speak truth I can’t seek truth.
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Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.
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Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it’s simply meaningless. We don’t live in order to die, we live in order to live.
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We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.
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A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. 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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The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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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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To oppose something is to maintain it.
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Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.
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When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
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If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.
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The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
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Like all power seekers, Pae was amazingly shortsighted. There was a trivial, abortive quality to his mind, it lacked depth, affect, imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive instrument.
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It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.
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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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Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however - that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc
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No doors were locked, few shut. There were no disguises and no advertisements. It was all there, all the work, all the life of the city, open to the eye and to the hand.