Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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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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'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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My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.
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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've got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin's not easy.
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'There’s a point, around age twenty,' Bedap said, 'when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.'
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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.
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I gather that a lot of the "pots" in the great museum in Baghdad, which we allowed to be looted and then gutted, are now for sale to the highest bidder on the art and archeology black market. This is good capitalism, I guess, while a museum, being a public trust and accessible to all, is anticapitalist, pretty damn near socialist in fact.
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It may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women. It may be there, even as free men and women, that we find freedom hardest to keep. The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.
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Mede spoke with amused tolerance, as physicists generally speak of biologists.
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Sometimes one’s very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.
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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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No, I don’t understand him, but he is worth listening to.
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The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.
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She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary.
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Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.
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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
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To see a candle’s light, one must take it into a dark place.
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I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.
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I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.
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No society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.
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The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
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The High-Intelligence Life Forms of the planet, of which there were at least three species, all of low technological achievement, they would ignore or enslave or extirpate, whichever was most convenient. For to an aggressive people only technology mattered.
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When we’ve agreed that something ought to be done, or not done, we get very stubborn. And when that meets up with another stubbornness, it can make a kind of war, a struggle of ideas, the only kind of war anybody ever wins.