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d00b67a
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They just came to look, as if she were the Great Tower in Rodarred, or the Canyon of the Tulaevea. A phenomenon, a monument. They were awed, adoring. She snarled at them: Think your own thoughts!
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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cff7575
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I write science fiction because that is what publishers call my books. Left to myself, I should call them novels.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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b962bf1
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It is our Puritanism, insisting that discipline means repression or punishment, which confuses the subject. To discipline something, in the proper sense of the word, does not mean to repress it, but to train it - to encourage it to grow, and act, and be fruitful, whether it is a peach tree or a human mind.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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124bd99
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T]he status of women in a society is a pretty reliable index of the degree of civilization of that society.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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84c3185
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For those who seek allegory, it must be maddening. (It must be allegory! Of course Frodo is Christ! - or is Gollum Christ?) for those whose grasp on reality is so tenuous that they crave ever-increasing doses of "realism" in their reading, it offers nothing - unless, perhaps, a shortcut to the looney bin."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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1ae189f
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People need God the way a three-year-old needs a chainsaw.
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religion
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8a72d99
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His eyes saved him. What they insisted on seeing and reporting to him took him out of the autism of terror.
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seeing
vision
terror
eyes
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6e052e0
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No ideologues, not even religious ones, are going to be happy with Tolkien, unless they manage it by misreading him. For like all great artists he escapes ideology by being too quick for its nets, too complex for its grand simplicities, too fantastic for its rationality, too real for generalizations.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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2cd6a77
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The little Otak was hiding in the rafters of the house, as it did when strangers entered. There it stayed while the rain beat on the walls and the fire sank down and the night wearing slowly along left the old woman nodding by the hearthpit. Then the otak crept down and came to Ged where he lay stretched stiff and still upon the bed. It began to lick his hands and wrists, long and patiently, with its dry leaf-brown tongue. Crouching beside ..
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wisdom
companionshipship
hoeg
otak
loyalty
pets
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d614da0
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I lied. I lied. I lied. I lied deliberately, knowingly, well. She lied. She is a liar. She is an intellectual too! She is a lie. And a coward, afraid.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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bca1dcb
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He was not interested in detached knowledge, science for science's sake: there was no use learning anything if it was of no use. Relevance was his touchstone.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7377fae
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It may remain for us to learn... that our task is only beginning, and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable and unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking;--that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past;--that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of ..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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b6ce6a7
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What we call 'evil' is produced by civilization, its constraints and repressions, deforming the spontaneous, free self-expression of the personality.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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9b1df29
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I did not live my life as history is written.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f2f8a14
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Thwil Town
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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55e3a05
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One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience. Back
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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1a90f6a
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This is part of what I meant about housework. If it isn't important, what is? If it isn't done honorably, where is honor? Ista
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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0071f6c
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Dessutom tar jag hellre emot daliga nyheter fran en arlig man an logner fran en smickrare (s. 72).
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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2ca9e5f
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COME HOME, TENAR! COME HOME!" In the deep valley, in the twilight, the apple trees were on the eve of blossoming; here and there among the shadowed boughs one flower had opened early, rose and white, like a faint star. Down the orchard aisles, in the thick, new, wet grass, the little girl ran for the joy of running; hearing the call she did not come at once, but made a long circle before she turned her face toward home. The mother waiting i..
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motherhood
loss
sorrow
ends
innocence
childhood
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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69a9dee
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I have this, this gift, I know that; and I know my obligation to it.
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obligation
talent
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8c5e470
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Det som forblir oforandrat for lange forstor sig sjalv. Skogen ar evig darfor att den dor och dor och darfor lever." (s. 319)"
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d4f17d2
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Contrast J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. The author adopts the childish view of adults as inhumanly powerful and uncomprehending, and never goes beyond it; and so his novel, published for adults, is better appreciated by ten-year-olds. The
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a0eaee1
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I never thought before," said Tirin unruffled, "of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, 'Look, there's the Moon.' Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth." "Where, then, is Truth?" declaimed Bedap, and yawned. "In the hill one happens to be sitting on," said Tirin."
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earth
moon
truth
anarres
hill
urras
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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9cd2f19
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it is strange, exceedingly strange, to know that one's life has been fulfilled. Yet
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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58ae51b
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They say one gets used to being a millionaire; so after a year or two a human being begins to get used to being a woman.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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c31cb0a
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The way that can be gone is not the eternal Way.. . . His
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a1cddba
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It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.
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time
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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cfbb590
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The strength of Shevek's personality, unchecked by any self-consciousness or consideration of self-defense, was formidable.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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42d7069
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When at last I learned forgetting, I learned it very quickly and all too well.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a652984
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When you have nothing to pray for, that's when Luck hears you. If
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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cb8f0ae
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It is what it looks like and is called. A jail. it is not a front for something else, not a facade, not a pseudonym. It is real, the real thing, the thing behind the words.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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ab0c614
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Most bigots are sincere.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7530a7f
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The Akan system is a spiritual discipline with spiritual goals, but they're exactly the same goals it seeks for bodily and ethical well-being.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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aa0954e
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My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable--but not as this world is. This is a l..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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867ed39
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Justice is in the hands of the gods, an old poet wrote, mortal hands hold only mercy and the sword.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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91858d5
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foundations, laid in the dark but well laid. On these, methodically and carefully but with a deftness and certainty that seemed nothing of his own but a knowledge working through him, using him as its vehicle, he built up the beautiful steadfast structure of the Principles of Simultaneity. Takver,
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7396e9e
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sitting at the table for six or eight hours straight. When he got up he would lurch with fatigue, his hands shook, and he was scarcely coherent. The usage the creator spirit gives its vessels is rough, it wears them out, discards them, gets a new model.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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03f17ee
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In this they resemble any reasonable being who does an unreasonable thing and justifies it with reasons. War, for example. My species has a great many good reasons for making war, though none of them is as good as the reason for not making war. Our most rational and scientific justifications-for instance, that we are an aggressive species-are perfectly circular: we make war because we make war. Our justifications for making a particular war..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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353dee1
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I'm not sure. I'm exceedingly ignorant-" The young man laughed and bowed. "I'm honored!" he said."I've lived here for three years, but haven't yet acquired enough ignorance to be worth mentioning."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f70462a
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I'm afraid of life! There are times I--I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn't all a misunderstanding-- this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain... If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could... get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reali..
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suffering
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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888e562
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You shall not go down good twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of id..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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15c159e
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There is no break in the wholeness of time.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a7f3d60
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Power inheres in a center. You're going to the center.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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e87cf66
|
He saw time turn back upon itself, a river flowing upward to the spring. He held the contemporaneity of two moments in his left and right hands; as he moved them apart he smiled to see the moments separate like dividing soap bubbles.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |