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c65d042
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Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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ffcb7a5
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People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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e68a351
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It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
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travel
journey
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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64e4a96
|
We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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33c4002
|
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
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revolution
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a33ec2c
|
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and : this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
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policy
certainty
humility
knowledge
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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04126ba
|
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
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future
philosophy
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f896f2b
|
It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
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ged
soul
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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4fc227a
|
Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6c4a174
|
It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f307fbc
|
But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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5f24375
|
Only in silence the word, Only in dark the light, Only in dying life: Bright the hawk's flight
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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754846b
|
The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f6db2f8
|
I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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2552534
|
Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren't real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
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reality
truth
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
fbee5ba
|
How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's ..
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the-left-hand-of-darkness
sci-fi
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
3966feb
|
Truth is a matter of the imagination.
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truth
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
d7904c0
|
For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able..
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politics
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
5e3b776
|
Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.
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knowledge
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
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cc4c255
|
To light a candle is to cast a shadow...
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good
equilibrium
taoism
knowledge
evil
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
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796bf1f
|
There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
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individuality
human-nature
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
e486828
|
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
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love
science-fiction
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
9c86f73
|
I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
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light
love
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
205f4ad
|
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
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story
reading
reader
stories
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
4043a57
|
I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the lov..
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loss
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
7a7c7cd
|
My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled 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.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8f019de
|
If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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eed7301
|
You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
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|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
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0c755f1
|
I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f6bfe8d
|
A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.
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fate
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
31fc694
|
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
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|
politics
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
409f65e
|
And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6282499
|
From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8a598a2
|
It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
a522818
|
To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
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story
living
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
d82d3f2
|
Go to bed; tired is stupid.
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|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
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1c4dd2b
|
You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
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|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
7713792
|
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 who, after all, you are.
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fate
destiny
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
232c610
|
I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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0183ab1
|
No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
8f0c613
|
You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he . . . .
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|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
5d6ff12
|
And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet I would remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.
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|
sunset
dragons
reminiscence
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
666d47a
|
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
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|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
4322956
|
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
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|
Ursula K. Le Guin |