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937b72c
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I hope you'll understand that I am not quoting those great words lightly. I do mean it. Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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b8ff08f
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There must be darkness to see the stars.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f347d2d
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Master," said Ged, "I cannot take your name from you, not being strong enough, and I cannot trick your name from you, not being wise enough. So I am content to stay here, and learn or serve, whatever you will: unless by chance you will answer a question I have." "Ask it." "What is your name?" The doorkeeper smiled, and said his name; and Ged, repeating it, entered for the last time into that House."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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dff94af
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I never know the heron as it flies at first. What is the slow, wide-winged figure in the sky? Then I see it, like a word in a foreign language, like seeing one's own name written in a strange alphabet and recognizing it, I say it: the heron.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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9638c11
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Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can't step into the same river twice. Life - evolution - the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy - existence itself - is essentially change.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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2429b06
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And he would watch the snow falling, thin and ceaseless, on the empty lands below the window, and feel the dull cold grow within him, till it seemed no feeling was left to him except a kind of weariness.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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c9745e0
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For discipline is the channel in which our acts run strong and deep; where there is no direction, the deeds of men run shallow and wander and are wasted.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f0d8bf3
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You have knowledge, and I have skill, and between us we have..." "We have the Ring of Erreth-Akbe." "Yes, that. But I thought also of another thing between us. Call it trust... That is one of its names. It is a very great thing. Though each of us alone is weak, having that we are strong, stronger than the Powers of the Dark."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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10ee2dc
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Ged stood sick and haggard. He said at last, "Better I had died." "Who are you to judge that, you for whom Nemmerle gave his life?--You are safe here. You will live here, and go on with your training. They tell me you were clever. Go on and do your work. Do it well. It is all you can do."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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b74bbbb
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Dangerous!" Vea laughed radiantly. "What an utterly marvellous compliment! Why am I dangerous, Shevek?" "Why, because you know that in the eyes of men you are a thing, a thing owned, bought, sold. And so you think only of tricking the owners, of getting revenge -"..."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6b4dd80
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Honor can exist anywhere, love can exist anywhere, but justice can exist only among people who found their relationships upon it.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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fcb6219
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It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7f2c611
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A friend. What is a friend, in a world where any friend may be a lover at a new phase of the moon? Not I, locked in my virility: no friend to Therem Harth, or any other of his race. Neither man nor woman, neither and both, cyclic, lunar, metamorphosing under the hand's touch, changelings in the human cradle, they were no flesh of mine, no friends; no love between us.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6826b12
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He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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798d86d
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Had his fear, in fact, been the personal fear that Selver might having learnt the racial hatred, reject him and treat him not as you but as one of them.
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one-of-them
selver
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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1f3ba12
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On a world where a common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has formed on your drink between drafts, hot beer is a thing you come to appreciate.
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humour
science-fiction
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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747ca62
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Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
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foretellers
prophecies
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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fd5706e
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but you're not a traitor, you've merely been the tool of one. I don't punish tools. They do harm only in the hands of a bad workman.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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619d0d8
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We didn't talk about problems, or parents, or automobiles, or ambitions. We talked about life....And the sea was there, forty feet away and getting closer, and the sky over the sea, and the sun going down the sky. And it was cold, and it was the high point of my life. I'd had high points before. Once at night walking in the park in the rain in autumn. Once out in the desert, under the stars, when I turned into the earth turning on its axis..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a6cf354
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The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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4cc1865
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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 know it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we have not known.
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interpretation
subconscious-mind
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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e209b90
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Which is better off, a lizard basking in the sun or a philosopher?
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philsophy
intellectualism
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d7c212a
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Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your mind, to buy safety?
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fantasy
fantasy-fiction
passions
safety
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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cd40d54
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A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can't "get into" me, it is already my deepest self. The poet was speaking of Juno as if it were a person, a woman, with likes and dislikes: a jealous woman. The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names--Mars of the fields and the war,..
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worship
spirituality
gods
mythology
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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4193dea
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The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.
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power
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6b30dee
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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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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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fb1d951
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Let age be age. Let your old relative or old friend be who they are. Denial serves nothing, no one, no purpose.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7f06cc1
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They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their h..
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happiness
omelas
misery
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6ef730a
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I don't believe in Darwin's theory of evolution. I accept it. It isn't a matter of faith, but of evidence.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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b0a06a1
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there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
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comfort
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a21f764
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On top of pique, umbrage, and ennui. Oh, the French diseases of the soul.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6b35531
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He laid his hands on her head, pushing back the hood. He began to speak. His voice was soft, and the words were in no tongue she had ever heard. The sound of them came into her heart like rain falling. She grew still to listen.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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57abe81
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The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more.
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satisfaction
greed
growth-ideology
tao
growth
power
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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4700c24
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I was in too much haste, and now have no time left.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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c63dffd
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Orr had a tendency to assume that people knew what they were doing, perhaps because he generally assumed that he did not.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d4b2f41
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Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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e92f087
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I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer,
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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fe41c65
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Literature is a field a great many men consider theirs by right. Virginia Woolf committed successful competition in that field. She barely escaped the first and most effective punishment--omission from the literary canon after her death. Yet eighty or ninety years later charges of snobbery and invalidism are still used to discredit and diminish her. Marcel Proust's limitations and his neuroticism were at least as notable as hers. But that P..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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04619f1
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Fish and visitors stink after three days.
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science-fiction
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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c3065a0
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I prefer to save talking till I know what I'm talking about.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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9209e18
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The heavy black she had worn for years was gone; her dress was of turquoise-colored silk, bright and soft as the evening sky. It belled out full from her hips, and all the skirt was embroidered with thin silver threads and seed pearls and tiny crumbs of crystal, so that it glittered softly, like rain in April. She looked at the magician, speechless. "Do you like it?" "Where--" "It's like a gown I saw a princess wear once, at the Feast of Su..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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c2ff5cc
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On the planet O there has not been a war for five thousand years, she read, and on Gethen there has never been a war." She stopped reading, to rest her eyes and because she was trying to train herself to read slowly. "There has never been a war." In her mind the words stood clear and bright, surrounded by and sinking into an infinite, dark, soft incredulity. What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace wa..
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war
reality
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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95439b9
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Realism is for lazy-minded, semi-educated people whose atrophied imagination allows them to appreciate only the most limited and convention subject matter. Re-Fi is a repetitive genre written by unimaginative hacks who rely on mere mimesis. If they had any self-respect they'd be writing memoir, but they're too lazy to fact-check. Of course I never read Re-Fi. But the kids keep bringing home these garish realistic novels and talking about th..
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realism
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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4617896
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It was more than dignity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved. 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 |