Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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A great deal of her obscurity and cant, Tenar had begun to realize, was mere ineptness with words and ideas. Nobody had ever taught her to think consecutively. Nobody had ever listened to what she said. All that was expected, all that was wanted of her was muddle, mystery, mumbling. She was a witchwoman. She had nothing to do with clear meaning.
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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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Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its weakness. But fantasy seems to be eternal and omnipresent and always attractive to kids.
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'But now you've come too far, and I warn you, woman! I will not have you set foot on this domain. And if you cross my will or dare so much as speak to me again, I will have you driven from Re Albi, and off the Overfell, with the dogs at your heels. Have you understood me?''No,' Tenar said, 'I have never understood men like you.'
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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 forgot, being too interested myself, that he’s a king, and does not see things rationally, but as a king.
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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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'Is it different, then, for men and for women?''What isn’t, dearie?'
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Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?
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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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Highdrake said that to make love is to unmake power.
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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?
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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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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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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.
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The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
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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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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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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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I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.
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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.
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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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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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Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.