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451cf3c
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You're a respectable woman, dearie, and her reputation is a woman's wealth." "Her wealth," Tenar repeated in the same blank way; then she said it again: "Her wealth. Her treasure. Her hoard. Her value..."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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842e987
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What are we so afraid of? Why don't we let 'em tell us we're afraid? What is it they're afraid of?" She picked up the stocking she had been darning, turned it in her hands, was silent awhile; finally she said, "What are they afraid of us for?"
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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1bb46b3
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The habit of silence is lead on the tongue.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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278b5f9
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The body is an arrangement in spacetime, a patterning, a process; the mind is a process of the body, an organ, doing what organs do: organize. Order, pattern, connect. . . . an immensely flexible technology, or life strategy, which if used with skill and resourcefulness presents each of us with that most fascinating of all serials, The Story of My Life.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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fd8f6cb
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No, brother, I'm sane. What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain- you said that! But it's the lies, the evasions of reality, that drive you crazy. It's the lies that make you want to kill yourself.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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791e6bf
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Gvarab was old enough that she often wandered and maundered. Attendance at her lectures was small and uneven. She soon picked out the thin boy with big ears as her one constant auditor. She began to lecture for him. The light, steady, intelligent eyes met hers, steadied her, woke her, she flashed to brilliance, regained the vision lost. She soared, and the other students in the room looked up confused or startled, even scared if they had th..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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cb01021
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You have not thought things through," he said. By his standards it was a brutal insult."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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4c33dd9
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She said it seemed like the only choices offered were to want to be what other people were, or to be what other people wanted you to be.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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90dfb32
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Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. 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 wh..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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bfbef27
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Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky. --The Creation of Ea
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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4fa7e58
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Not all roads that lead down lead up as well.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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26a727f
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A wizard's power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow...
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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81c0084
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If we hide, Therru, we feed him. We will eat. And we will starve him. Come with me.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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90d1fe5
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He said after a little while, 'I see why you say that only men do evil, I think. Even sharks are innocent, they kill because they must.' 'That is why nothing can resist us. Only one thing in the worl can resist an evil-hearted man. And that is another man. In our shame is our glory. Only our spirit, which is capable of evil, is capable of overcoming it.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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3776c46
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It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can seperate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance that's already between us, the distance of our sex, the differance of our being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which we bridge with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest thing in the world. Look how far away he is, asleep. Look how far away he is, he always is. But he comes back, he comes back, h..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7c7f3bd
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The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a838767
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Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. Y..
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hierarchy
materialism
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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32cfc58
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I think men mostly have to learn to be anarchists. Women don't have to learn." Vokep shook his head grimly. "It's the kids," he said. "Having babies. Makes 'em propertarians. They won't let go." He sighed. "Touch and go, brother, that's the rule. Don't ever let yourself be owned."
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relationship
ownership
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d869a9a
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You can't change anything from the outside in. Standing apart, looking down, talking the overview, you see pattern. What's wrong, what's missing. You want to fix it. But you can't patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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664968e
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I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend's voice arises: and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?
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prejudice
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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cde0842
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But I think we will have trouble learning how to lie, having for so long practiced the art of going round an round the truth without ever lying about it, or reaching it either.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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636c652
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Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7fe6dee
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Well, we come here to the Fastnesses mostly to learn what questions not to ask." "But you're the Answerers!" "You don't see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?" "No--" "To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question."
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prescience
divinity
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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aad72ce
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When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast.... The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8097936
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
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trump
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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0c7a92a
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A man gives out, dearie. A woman takes in.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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1856abc
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The unknown," said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, "the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion..."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a01eb62
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Karhiders discuss sexual matters freely, and talk about kemmer with both reverence and gusto, but they are reticent about discussing perversion - at least they were with me. Excessive prolongation of the kemmer period, with permanent hormonal imbalance toward the male or the female, causes what they call perversion; it is not rare; three or four percent of adults may be physiological perverts or abnormals - normals, by our standard. They ar..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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9d2fdd0
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Our entire pattern of socio-sexual interaction is nonexistent here. They cannot play the game. They do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imagination to accept. What is the first question we ask about a newborn baby?
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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153fe30
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I wore his blood for clothing, on my legs and thighs and hands: a dry, stiff, brown garment with no warmth in it.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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cf97d00
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They made love. 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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37d1549
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Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics. The hell with The Great American Novel. We have all the great novels we need right now--and right now some man or woman is writing a new one we won't know we needed till we read it.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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cf8573d
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Judgement is poverty.
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inspirational
mindfulness
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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b651a9d
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You are like a lantern swathed and covered, hidden away in a dark place. Yet the light shines; they could not put out the light. They could not hide you.
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spirit
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6664e49
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There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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be8c615
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Students are intense people, they laugh and cry, they break down and rebuild.
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students
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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38c5d31
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In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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cfbe1cb
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But nobody in one lifetime could read more than a fragment of what was here, this broken labyrinth of words, this shattered, interrupted story of a people and a world through the centuries, the millennia.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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587a38c
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The first thing I can remember clearly is writing the way into the secret room.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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97c92e6
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He is the earth and sunlight, the leaves of trees, the eagle's flight. He is alive. And all who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end.
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life
rebirth
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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1cb29e1
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The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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b0e3bb0
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This concern, feebly called 'love of nature', seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
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nature
love
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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3fec908
|
The word he used was not "wallowing," there being no animals on Anarres to make wallows; it was a compound, meaning literally "coating continually and thickly with excrement." The flexibility and precision of Pravic lent itself to the creation of vivid metaphors quite unforeseen by its inventors."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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34f3c9c
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Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains... and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief. Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust. "You call that organization?" he had inquired. "You even call it dis..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |