0729f82
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SEEN ACROSS TEN MILES OF sunlit water, Lorbanery was green, green as the bright moss by a fountain's rim. Nearby, it broke up into leaves, and tree-trunks, and shadows, and roads, and houses, and the faces and clothing of people, and dust, and all that goes to make up an island inhabited by men. Yet still, over all, it was green: for every acre of it that was not built or walked upon was given up to the low, round-topped hurbah trees, on th..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
a4727a6
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Orr's gods were nameless and unenvious, asking neither worship nor obedience.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
41501df
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I spoke your true name. It's not what I thought it would be. And I don't feel easy about it. As if I'd left something unfinished. But it is your name. If it betrays you, then that's the truth of it." Rose hesitated and then spoke less angrily, more coldly: "If you want the power to betray me, Irian, I'll give you that. My name is Etaudis." "Dragonfly"
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
10601f6
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He welcomed isolation with all his heart. It never occurred to him that the reserve he met in Bedap and Tirin might be a response; that his gentle but already formidable hermetic character might form its own ambiance, which only great strength, or great devotion, could withstand. All he noticed, really, was that he had plenty of time to work at last.
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work
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
6bd578c
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These two issues combined--our inability to deal with our own numbers and our insistence that we are what matters most--may well be the finish of us.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
48ee5a4
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A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you.
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literature
psychoanalysis
journey
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
363c6e2
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Are all the scientists here men, then?" "Scientists?" Oiie asked, incredulous. Pae coughed. "Scientists. Oh, yes, certainly, they're all men. There are some female teachers in the girls' schools, of course. But they never get past Certificate level." "Why not?" "Can't do the math; no head for abstract thought; don't belong. You know how it is, what women call thinking is done with the uterus! Of course, there's always a few exceptions, God-..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
432594a
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To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
e8c40cc
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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. Or wonder who, after all, you are.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
a2de63f
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I think most old people know that, and many of us try to keep our thinking on the positive side as a matter of self-preservation, as well as dignity, the wish not to end with a prolonged whimper.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
535a1bf
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People are supposed to be lean. You can't be too thin, everybody says so, especially anorexics. People are supposed to be lean and taut, because that's how men generally are, lean and taut, or anyhow that's how a lot of men start out and some of them even stay that way. And men are people, people are men, that has been well established, and so people, real people, the right kind of people, are lean. But I'm really lousy at being people, bec..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
3edb061
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I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
4297c05
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Wasn't it immoral to do work you didn't enjoy? The work needed doing but a lot of people didn't care what they were posted to and changed jobs all the time; they should have volunteered. Any fool could do this work.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
31e02b9
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The poet Gary Snyder's finely unpoetic image of composting is useful here. Stuff goes into the writer, a whole lot of stuff, not notes in a notebook but everything seen and heard and felt all day every day, a lot of garbage, leftovers, dead leaves, eyes of potatoes, artichoke stems, forests, streets, rooms in slums, mountain ranges, voices, screams, dreams, whispers, smells, blows, eyes, gaits, gestures, the touch of a hand, a whistle in th..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
d1a7002
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his story told of the king's daughter Cassandra, who foresaw what would happen and tried to prevent the Trojans from letting the great horse into the city, but no one would listen to her: it was a curse laid on her, to see the truth and say it and not be heard. It is a curse laid on women more often than on men. Men want the truth to be theirs, their discovery and property.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
b665e67
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We're not outside the world... We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don't say the words, what is their in our world?
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words
world
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
e19b476
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And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
fc31000
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For the kindest of them was as far out of touch, as unreachable, as the crudest.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
b7697fb
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I'm not dead. I sleep sometimes. Sleep comes very close to death, everyone knows that. The dead walk in dreams, everyone knows that. They come to you alive, and they say things. They walk out of death into the dreams.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
7666f6d
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In diversity is life and where there's life there's hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest! one to be sure.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
da99945
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The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved; the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
204dd97
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Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom...and that freedom must not be compromised. It must be available to all who need it, when they need it, and that's always.
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libraries
freedom
knowledge
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
02df19b
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To go under a river: there's a strange thing to do, a really weird idea.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
1cd5e8a
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You seemed, in your power, as free as man can be. But at what cost? What made you free? And I... I was made, moulded like clay, by the will of the women serving the Old Powers, or serving the men who made all services and ways and places, I no longer know which. Then I went free, with you, for a moment, and with Ogion. But it was not my freedom. Only it gave me a choice; and I chose. I chose to mould myself like clay to the use of a farm an..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
2943126
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The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful the life is, is from the vantage point of death.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
85f5d67
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if I wanted to be the center of the universe I'd have a dog.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
0715b40
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Orr slept. He dreamed. There was no rub.
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sleep
shakespeare
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
8b99f5c
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He began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. In the Creation of Ea, which is the oldest song, it is said, 'Only in silence the wor..
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good-and-evil
self-knowledge
fear
death
life
coming-of-age
manhood
evil
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
7347608
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Let us consider Elfland as a great national park, a vast and beautiful place where a person goes by himself, on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion. But what happens when it is considered merely as a place to "get away to"? Well, you know what has happened to Yosemite. Everybody comes, not with an ax and a box of matches, but in a trailer with a motorbike on the back and a motorboat on top and a butane..
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reality
fantasy
encapulsation
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
63a8d24
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But belief is the wound that knowledge heals, and death begins the Telling of our life
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
370d606
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Then I saw . . . you see . . . I saw that you can't do anything for anybody. We can't save each other. Or ourselves.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
1ca80cf
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To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
d92a489
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I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied.... None of this is spare time. I can't spare it. ... I have no time to spare.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
b953e9a
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To break a rule you have to know the rule. A blunder is not a revolution.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
42cc051
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I suspect that the distinction between a maternal and a paternal instinct is scarcely worth making; the parental instinct, the wish to protect, to further, is not a sex-linked characteristic...
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gender
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
6b1f0d3
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None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire ..
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science-fiction
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
f48e589
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Paradise is for those who make Paradise.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
5c5fc4f
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They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mi..
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love
fugitive
prison
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
9edbec5
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My mother died at eighty-three, of cancer, in pain, her spleen enlarged so that her body was misshapen. Is that the person I see when I think of her? Sometimes. I wish it were not. It is a true image, yet it blurs, it clouds, a truer image. It is one memory among fifty years of memories of my mother. It is the last in time. Beneath it, behind it is a deeper, complex, ever-changing image, made from imagination, hearsay, photographs, memories..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
a7d42ff
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I wrote an essay about the rhythm of Tolkien's writing in The Lord of the Rings. Short rhythms repeated form long rhythms; there's a cyclical repetition in his work which I think is part of why it totally enchants so many of us. We are caught in this rhythm and are happy there.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
972a152
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We're a lot of newcomers, see, for my Lord Meshe was born 2,202 years ago, but the Old Way of the Handdara goes back ten thousand years before that. You have to go back to the Old Land if you're after the Old Way. Now look here, Mr. Ai, I'll have a room in this island for you whenever you come back, but I believe you're a wise man to be going out of Erhenrang for a while, for everybody knows that the Traitor made a great show of befriending..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
dca754b
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The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth an light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale's sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat's flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole. But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the..
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mankind
responsibility
nature
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
d99b12d
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nusuth
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
802f3d6
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The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |