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All the mystery and wisdom of the Masters, when it’s out in the daylight, doesn’t amount to so much, you know. Tricks of the trade-wonderful illusions. But people don’t want to know that. They want the illusions, the mysteries. Who can blame them? There’s so little in life that’s beautiful or worthy.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
There is not much good spending twelve hours a day in a black hole in the ground all your life long if there’s nothing there, no secret, no treasure, nothing hidden.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Hughes, who had entered the space program from astrophysics, came with a very good record, in fact a brilliant one. This troubled many of his military superiors, to whom high intelligence was a code word for instability and insubordination.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
Grow up. Grow up. Time to grow up. You’re here now. We’re working on physics here, not religion. Drop the mysticism and grow up.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Shelley was kicked out of Oxford-I think the story is unauthenticated, but who cares-because he painted a sign on the end wall of a dead-end alley: THIS WAY TO HEAVEN. I feel that every now and then his sign needs repainting.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn’t saved, isn’t taught?
Ursula K. Le Guin -
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit or, it is nowhere.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
'Is it different, then, for men and for women?''What isn’t, dearie?'
Ursula K. Le Guin
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All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that’s the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it’s life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?
Ursula K. Le Guin -
We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God’s truth, the universe at once began to exist.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
All I know is the dark, the night underground. And that’s all there really is. That’s all there is to know, in the end. The silence, and the dark. You know everything, wizard. But I know one thing - the one true thing!
Ursula K. Le Guin -
Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Manipulated, one manipulates others.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
'Aye. Like knows like, sister'
Ursula K. Le Guin -
All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin