Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Maybe that’s what the Masters are afraid of. Maybe celibacy isn’t as necessary as the Rule of Roke teaches. Maybe it’s not a way of keeping the power pure, but of keeping the power to themselves.
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It was men’s ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.
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Her left hand reminded her of its existence, and she looked round to see what was scratching the heel of her hand. It was a tiny thistle, crouched in a crack in the sandstone, barely lifting its colorless spikes into the light and wind. It nodded stiffly as the wind blew, resisting the wind, rooted in rock. She gazed at it for a long time.
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It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
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See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
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Nobody had made this wilderness, and there was no evil in it and no good; it simply was.
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He liked the vast openness of sky and prairie, and found loneliness a pleasure with so immense a domain to be alone in.
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She had come to Aka to learn how to sing this world's tune, to dance its dance; and at last, she thought, away from the city's endless noise, she was beginning to hear the music and to learn how to move to it.
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I was utterly miserable, and yet fearless as I had never been. I was carefree. It was like dying. It would be foolish to worry about anything while one died.
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Highdrake said that to make love is to unmake power.
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'The solution lies in secrecy,' said Medra. 'But so does the problem.'
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Ignorant power is a bane!
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They can keep their God, they can keep their Light. I want the world back. I want questions, not the answer. I want my own life back, and my own death!
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And I know that all I understand about living is having your work to do, and being able to do it. That’s the pleasure, and the glory, and all. And if you can’t do the work, or it’s taken from you, then what’s any good? You have to have something....
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The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.
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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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That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.
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'Why must there be war?' 'Oh Lavinia, what a woman's question that is! Because men are men.'
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Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.
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The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.
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I forgot, being too interested myself, that he’s a king, and does not see things rationally, but as a king.
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After a lifetime of living on hope because there is nothing but hope, one loses the taste for victory.
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I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
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A scientist can pretend that his work isn’t himself, it’s merely the impersonal truth. An artist can’t hide behind the truth. He can’t hide anywhere.