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226ed20
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Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. --Chuang Tse: XXIII
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understanding
fate
limits
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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17db47b
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Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new. When it was made, they lay in each other's arms, holding love, asleep.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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25e237e
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I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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c4fb8d1
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Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are.
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nature-of-perception
ideas
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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b645261
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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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martyrdom
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8372692
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If women had power what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?
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women
power
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6483877
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Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly.
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religion
nationalism
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6ba3343
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My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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0fadef0
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I always grow poetic when I am lying to myself.
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poetic
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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3fcaf8f
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There's another option. You can consider the reader, not as a helpless victim or a passive consumer, but as an active, intelligent, worthy collaborator. A colluder, a coillusionist.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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31373ed
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You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes - the walls, the walls!
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a213452
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Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f33173c
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But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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fea9c28
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Now they came back to him, on this night he was seventeen years old. All the years and places of his brief broken life came within mind's reach and made a whole again. He knew once more, at last, after this long, bitter, waisted time, who he was and where he was. But where he must go in the years to come, that he could not see; and he feared to see it.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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e4a2d3e
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This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.
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volition
social-class
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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819271f
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I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself pose no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy. But there's more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is ..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a31560f
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I don't know. Do men kill men, except in madness? Does any beast kill its own kind? Only the insects. These yumens kill us as lightly as we kill snakes. The one who taught me said that they kill one another, in quarrels, and also in groups, like ants fighting. I haven't seen that. But I know they don't spare one who asks life. They will strike a bowed neck, I have seen it! There is a wish to kill in them, and therefore I saw fit to put them..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7f73e5a
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I don't have a gun and I don't have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after "semicolons," and another one after "now." And another thing. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himsel..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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99aa1e6
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I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.
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women
sexism
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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550dfb9
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They were without shame and without desire, like the angels. But it is not human to be without shame and without desire.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f0726cd
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It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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be2ea96
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Yet we were rescued by that fancy, and saved by a myth.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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76fc6f5
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Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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437f1e5
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She thought about how it was to have been a woman in the prime of life, with children and a man, and then to lose all that, becoming old and a widow, powerless. But even so she did not feel she understood his shame, his agony of humiliation. Perhaps only a man could feel so. A woman got used to shame.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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0cc0939
|
In Enlad," said Arren after a while, "we have a story about the boy whose schoolmaster was a stone:' "Aye?... What did he learn?" "Not to ask questions."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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99f5371
|
And here's an example of deliberate violation of a Fake Rule: Fake Rule: The generic pronoun in English is he. Violation: "Each one in turn reads their piece aloud." This is wrong, say the grammar bullies, because each one, each person is a singular noun and their is a plural pronoun. But Shakespeare used their with words such as everybody, anybody, a person, and so we all do when we're talking. ("It's enough to drive anyone out of thei..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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c3ca25e
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The prisoner is the jailer's jailer.
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prisoner
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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ca93450
|
There is solid evidence for the fact that when women speak more than 30 percent of the time, men perceive them as dominating the conversation; well, similarly, if, say, two women in a row get one of the big annual literary awards, masculine voices start talking about feminist cabals, political correctness, and the decline of fairness in judging. The 30 percent rule is really powerful. If more than one woman out of four or five won the Pulit..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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1b18960
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There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is 'superior' to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom.
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freedom
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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b9f3572
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Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number - Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysis, every now and then.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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e2bfcbe
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To be reborn one must die, Tenar. It is not so hard as it looks from the other side.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6fe9554
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What is evil?" asked the younger man. The round web, with its black center, seemed to watch them both. "A web we men weave." Ged answered."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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503ee60
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In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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ba83388
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Love that wants only to get, to possess, is a monstrous thing
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jealousy
love
ownership
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f9f2157
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The trouble is, women have to be absolutely first class to get where third-class men get.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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e9ce20d
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Infinite are the arguments of mages,
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7d1de52
|
Grain grows best in shit...
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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615ecd8
|
An enemy, in Karhide, is not a stranger, an invader. The stranger who comes unknown is a guest. Your enemy is your neighbor.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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cb56aa4
|
The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrodinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future - indeed Schrodinger most famous thought experiment goes to show that the "future," on the quantum level, cannot be predicted - but to describe reality, the present world. Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fe..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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373363f
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I am tired of safe places, and roofs, and walls around me.
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restlessness
wanderlust
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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e91baf3
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It appears that we've given up on the long-range view. That we've decided not to think about consequences--about cause and effect. Maybe that's why I feel that I live in exile. I used to live in a country that had a future.
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politics
truth
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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633d466
|
We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. 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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society
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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68df3d6
|
Her despair grew so great that it burst her breast open and like a bird of fire shattered the stone and broke out into the light of day--the light of day, faint in her windowless room.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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5796a67
|
You have nothing. You posses nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |