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8d2cb62
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The tree said in its rooted being, "All my leaves are seen, but one, this one in the darkness cast by all the others. This one leaf I keep secret to myself. Who will see it in the darkness of my leaves? And who will count the number of them?"
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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4454026
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The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.
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existentialism
psychiatry
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7f3f381
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The daily hummingbird assaults existence with improbability.
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hummingbird
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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00e6419
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Orr was not a fast reasoner. In fact, he was not a reasoner. He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heavy ground of existence.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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78ce83c
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All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all around, everywhere. When we walked on the crisp snow no shadow showed the footprint. We left no track. Sledge, tent, himself, myself: nothing else at all. No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world.
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setting
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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c058ada
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They tended to be stolid, slovenly, heavy, and to my eyes effeminate - not in the sense of delicacy, etc., but in just the opposite sense: a gross, bland fleshiness, a bovinity without point or edge.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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98d79d1
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I am yours by parentage and custom and by duty undertaken towards you. I am your wizard. But it is time you recalled that, tough I am a servant, I am not your servant.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6cdcdc4
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He was one whose power was akin to, and as strong as, the Old Powers of the earth; one who talked with dragons, and held off earthquakes with his word. And there he lay asleep on the dirt, with a little thistle growing by his hand. It was very strange. Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed. The glory of the sky touched his dusty hair, and turned the thistle gold for a little while.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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23c60f1
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This writing doesn't affect reality any more than any writing does; that is to say, indirectly, but considerably.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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ff4f074
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If we insist that in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, we've sacrificed right to might. (That's what History does after most wars, when it applauds the victors for their superior virtue as well as their superior firepower.) If we falsify the terms of the competition, handicapping it, so that the good guys may lose the battle but always win the war, we've left the real world, we're in fantasy land--wishful thinking cou..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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e760df5
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the Old Powers of earth are not for men to use. They were never given into our hands, and in our hands they work only ruin. Ill means, ill end. I was not drawn here, but driven here, and the force that drove me works to my undoing.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d432ea6
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It isn't changing around from place to place that keeps you lively. It's getting time on your side. Working with it, not against it.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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ca4708c
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I think if you have lost a great happiness and try to recall it, you are only asking for sorrow, but if you do not try to dwell on the happiness, sometimes you find it dwelling in your heart and body, silent but sustaining.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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fbf5bb2
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If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them. Their inexperience saved the passenger's life.
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community
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8439bdb
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It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
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violence
shame
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d546bb8
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A people that doesn't live at the center of the world, as defined and described by its poets and storytellers, is in a bad way. The center of the world is where you live fully, where you know how things are done, how things are done rightly, done well.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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217ac97
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The really terrible thing about being young is the triviality
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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2ed82b8
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Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. {...} But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be.
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being
choices
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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b480571
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Ged saw all these things from outside and apart, alone, and his heart was very heavy in him, though he would not admit to himself that he was sad. As night fell he still lingered in the streets, reluctant to go back to the inn. He heard a man and a girl talking together merrily as they came down the street past him towards the town square, and all at once he turned, for he knew the man's voice. He followed and caught up with the pair, comin..
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solitude
loneliness
welcome
recognition
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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414f233
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Well," he said slowly, "sometimes there's a passion that comes in its springtime to ill fate or death. And because it ends in its beauty, it's what the harpers sing of and the poets make stories of: the love that escapes the years.... "All or nothing, 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 gli..
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lovers
love
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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418fae4
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chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don't see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can't make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility. To say that a good end will fo..
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responsibility
ethics
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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e4bf2ae
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On the blank leaf glued to the inner back cover I drew the double curve within the circle, and blacked the yin half of the symbol, then pushed it back to my companion. 'Do you know that sign?' He looked at it a long time with a strange look, but he said, 'No.' 'It's found on Earth, and on Hain-Davenant, and on Chiffewar. It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness...how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female,..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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28cb9ec
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Why is it that if you say you don't enjoy using an e-reader, or that you aren't going to get one till the technology is mature, you get reported as "loathing" it?
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reading
e-reading
e-books
digital
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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eb87b86
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Laws are made against the impulse a people most fears in itself. Do not kill was the Shing's vaunted single Law. All else was permitted: which meant, perhaps, there was little else they really wanted to do...
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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af1b793
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So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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96aae49
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We are not seeking power. We are seeking the end of power! ... The means are the end. ... Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice!
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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79aa403
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I want to say to the literature teacher who remains wilfully, even boastfully ignorant of a major element of contemporary fiction: you are incompetent to teach or judge your subject. Readers and students who do know the field, meanwhile, have every right to challenge your ignorant prejudice. Rise, undergraduates of the English departments! You have nothing to lose but your A on the midterm!
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fantasy
critics
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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c5bd091
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I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ignorance that dismisses any book, unread, as not worth reading." -- "On Despising Genres," essay"
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science-fiction
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8a7424a
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I've been looking only at what's to be done next and forgetting why we're doing it.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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cf99bdf
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All who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end. All, save you. For you would not have death. You lost death, you lost life, in order to save yourself. Yourself! Your immortal self! What is it? Who are you?" "I am myself. My body will not decay and die-" "A living body suffers pain, Cob; a living body grows old; it dies. Death is the price we pay for our life and for all life." "I do not pay it! I can..
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heaven
life
earthsea
the-farthest-shore
self
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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051271e
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The room smelled of books, that subtle smell which to some is stuffy and to others intoxicating, and it was silent.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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08ec24a
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We are all contingent. Resentment is foolish and ungenerous, and even anger is inadequate. I am a fleck of light on the surface of the sea, a glint of light from the evening star. I live in awe. If I never lived at all, yet I am a silent wing on the wind, a bodiless voice in the forest of Albunea. I speak, but all I can say is: Go, go on.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6e81a65
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But I can't say that gratitude was my motive for infringing on the Law of Cultural Embargo. I was not paying my debt to him. Such debts remain owing. Estraven and I had simply arrived at the point where we shared whatever we had that was worth sharing.
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sharing
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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07c5078
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It exists," Shevek said, spreading out his hands. "It's real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can't pretend that it doesn't exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it's right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suff..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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bd762f3
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WE stowed the wheels, uncapped the sledge-runners, put on our sis, and took off -- down, north, onward, into that silent vastness of fire an ice that said in enormous letters of black and white DEATH, DEATH, written right across a continent. The sledge pulled like a feather, and we laughed with joy.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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4f5d061
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The art of one's own time tends to be formidable . . . because we have to learn how and where to take hold of it, what response is being asked of us, before we can get involved. It's truly new, and therefore truly a bit frightening.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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13db5a6
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And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he do....
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responsibility
power
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Ursula K Le Guin |
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eddeec1
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Ursula K. Le Guin urges authors to remember why they do what they do. Her argument is that writing is an form of art rather than a commodity.
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writing
books
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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4888206
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Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
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writing
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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49189e5
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I bid your voice be dumb until the day you find a word worth speaking.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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b33ec00
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The presence of females was oppressive to them all. It seemed to them that lately the world was full of girls. Everywhere they looked, waking or asleep, they saw giris. They had all tried copulating with girls; some of them in despair had also tried not copulating with girls. It made no difference. The girls were there.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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600063b
|
I think... most women marry to get their freedom." "Then they want less than I do. There's something inside me, in my heart, a brightness and a heaviness, how can I describe it? Something that exists and does not yet exist, which is mine to carry, and not mine to give up to any man."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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168fada
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She the stranger, the foreigner, of alien blood and mind, did not share his power or his conscience or his knowledge or his exile. She shared nothing at all with him, but had met him and joined with him wholly and immediately across the gulf of their great difference: as if it were that difference, the alienness between them, that let them meet, and that in joining them together, freed them.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f93bfe4
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With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city. Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave m..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |