Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.
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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.
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Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger.
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'It is not right to want to die,' the Summoner said....'For the very old, the very ill, it may be. But life is given us. Surely it’s wrong not to hold and treasure that great gift!''Death also is given us,' said the king.
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A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.
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I haven't any strength, I haven't any character, I'm a born tool. I haven't any destiny. All I have is dreams. And now other people run them.
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There’s no way to use power for good.
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What would that be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality.
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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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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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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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You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice.
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If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.
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'It always seemed to me they’re sort of alike,' he said, 'magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.'
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No granite is so hard as hatred and no clay so cold as cruelty.
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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!
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You’ll know what to say when the time comes. That’s the art, eh? What to say, and when to say it. And the rest is silence.
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You know, I don't think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn't. Probably because I don't want to start thinking, "Am I popular?" I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school.
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Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.
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The First Envoy to a world always comes alone. One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion.
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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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It was men’s ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.
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Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we knew it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we did not know.