Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
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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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And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend’s voice arises, and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?
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Mr. Ai, we’ve seen the same events with different eyes; I wrongly thought they’d seem the same to us.
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'Aye. Like knows like, sister'
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How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn’t saved, isn’t taught?
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'In innocence there is no strength against evil,' said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. 'But there is strength in it for good.'
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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.
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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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The news had stirred him strangely. He listened for bulletins on the radio, which he had seldom turned on after finding that its basic function was advertising things for sale.
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They prevented men from doing anything. But they did nothing themselves. They did not rule, they only blighted.
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Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.
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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.
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Easy victories aren’t worth winning.
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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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What is a woman's power then?" she asked. "I don't think we know." "When has a woman power because she's a woman? With her children, I suppose. For a while..." "In her house, maybe." She looked around the kitchen. "But the doors are shut," she said, "the doors are locked." "Because you're valuable." "Oh yes. We're precious. So long as we're powerless.
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Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.
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Those were men in whom great strength and knowledge served the will to evil and fed upon it. Whether the wizardry that serves a better end may always prove the stronger, we do not know. We hope.
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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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If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer's primary objective, I am not teaching writing; I'm teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.
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Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?
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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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It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.
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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.