Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
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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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A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
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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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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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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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To oppose something is to maintain it.
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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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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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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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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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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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'A king has soldiers, servants, messengers, lieutenants. He governs through his servants. Where are the servants of this-Anti-king?''In our minds, lad. In our minds. The traitor, the self; the self that cries I want to live; let the world burn so long as I can live! The little traitor soul in us, in the dark, like the worm in the apple.'
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'The mission I am on overrides all personal debts and loyalties.''If so,' said the stranger with fierce certainty, 'it is an immoral mission.'
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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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.
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When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
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Uninfluenced by others, he never knew he influenced them; he had no idea they liked him.
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I don't want to be a propagandist, no matter how good the cause. I want to tell stories. It's just that the stories have to square with my consciousness as a woman and my conscience as a human being.
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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
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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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Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.