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c356927
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But I liked the writing better. I could make it look beautiful. I could keep it. The spoken words just went out like the wind, and you always had to say them all over again to keep them alive. But the writing stayed, and you could learn to make it better. More beautiful.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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515c08d
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I am tired,>> he said. <> <> the Alien said.
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choice
life
volition
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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2c17fab
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When all ways are lost the way is clear.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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0eb9152
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They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods. However vast the distances separating settlements, they held to the ideal of complex organicism.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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fb0e67b
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Meaning - this is perhaps the common note, the bane I am seeking. What is the Meaning of this book, this event in the book, this story ... ? Tell me what it Means. But that is not my job, honey. That's your job.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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201f140
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Praise God from whom all blessings flow, including good-natured men.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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711606d
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Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
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war
primitiveness
society
peace
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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76d5a59
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The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or evil. If there was a woman in the story, she was a passive object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blond princess); active women (dark, witches) usually caused destruction or tragedy. Anyway, t..
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feminism
fantasy
bigotry
tradition
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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5b60c9f
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talk is an art and a pleasure, not a matter of mere use and need.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7f23522
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But even the most unmissionary soul, unless he pretend he has no emotions, is sometimes faced with a choice between commission and omission. 'What are they doing?' abruptly becomes, 'What are we doing?' and then, 'What must I do?
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7db35aa
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The most winning characteristic of the rather harsh Cetian temperament was curiosity, inopportune, and inexhaustible curiosity; Cetians died eagerly, curious as to what came next.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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5a1f85d
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He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.
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irony
science-fiction
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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fc56a37
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'Banished men should never speak their native tongue; it comes bitter from their mouth. And this language suits a traitor better, I think; drips off one's teeth like sugar-syrup.'
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languages
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d1f8536
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A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one's function in the sociopolitical whole.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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73240fa
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He talked a great deal about Truth also, for he was, he said, "cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization." It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer (or paint, or pliofilm, or whatever) hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once. One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness... Of cour..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d111f6f
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George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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231172f
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Opinion all too often leaves no room for anything but itself.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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47dd257
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The beauty ideal is always a youthful one. This is partly simple realism. The young are beautiful. The whole lot of 'em. The older I get, the more clearly I see that and enjoy it. But it gets harder and harder to enjoy facing the mirror. Who is that old lady? Where is her waist? I got resigned, sort of, to losing my dark hair and getting all this limp grey stuff instead, but now am I going to lose even that and end up all pink scalp? I mean..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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1fc3a2b
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Where does your soul go when you die in Hell?
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melancholy
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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0f95a01
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So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f3518e5
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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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2550d19
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An irrelevant and poignant sensation of pleasure rose in him, like a tree that grew up and flowered all in one moment with its roots in his loins and its flowers in his mind.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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ac55e5c
|
Old age generally involves pain and danger and inevitably ends in death. The acceptance of that takes courage. Courage deserves respect.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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781f80a
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Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it - because they're afraid of it. They're afraid of dragons. They have Smaugophobia. "Oh those awful Orcs," they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they'll have to admit that fantasy can be literature,..
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literature
fantasy-fiction
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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c7d9c93
|
Can you walk the road your dream goes? Sometimes. Sometimes I am afraid to. Who is not. ...
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walking-the-dream
road
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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987b46c
|
In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell.
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hell-on-earth
purgatory
hell
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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bf122a7
|
I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved nothing except perhaps a rather subtler point.
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love
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6b9013d
|
Light is a power. A great power, by which we exist, but which exists beyond our needs, in itself. Sunlight and starlight are time, and time is light. In the sunlight, in the days and years, life is. In a dark place life may call upon the light, naming it. But usually when you see a wizard name or call upon some thing, some object to appear, that is not the same, he calls upon no power greater than himself, and what appears is an illusion on..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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ba293da
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The life of every man is in the Center of Time, for all were seen in the seeing of Meshe, and are in his eye. We are the pupils of his Eye... Our doing is his Seeing: our being is his Knowing.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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dba18cb
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I don't like making the rest of the world live in my dreams, but I certainly don't want to live in yours.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7e999ef
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In diversity is life and where there's life there's hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest one to be sure.
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hope
life
inspirational
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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2808bff
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Question 14: "Are you living your secret desires?" Floored again. I finally didn't check Yes, Somewhat, or No, but wrote in "I have none, my desires are flagrant."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d8db803
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A man who doesn't detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government in earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.
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the-left-hand-of-darkness
ursula-le-guin
ursula-k-le-guin
government
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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b5fef98
|
She could not have been born gray. Her color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people's world. She had not been born.
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individuality
people
women
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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33ebe79
|
Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd.
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iliteracy
science-fition
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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45f7cad
|
There's a great maze of tunnels, a Labyrinth. It's like a great dark city, under the hill. Full of gold, and the swords of old heroes, and old crowns, and bones, and years, and silence.' She spoke if in trance, rapture. Manan watched her. His slabby face never expressed much but stolid, careful sadness; it was sadder than usual now. 'Well, and you're mistress of all that,' he said. 'The silence, and the dark.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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5ec26ce
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But she knew, though very vaguely, that she was crying, because hope hurts terribly when it breaks through the resignation in which you have lived for days.
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hope
resignation
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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63328b8
|
Dragons think we are amusing. But they remember Erreth-Akbe. They speak of him as if he were a dragon, not a man.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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1457db4
|
I only ask your help, for which I have nothing to give in return." "Nothing? You call your theory nothing" "Weigh it in the balance with the freedom of one single human spirit," he said, turning to her, "and which will weigh heavier? Can you tell? I cannot."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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378ff20
|
When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8419b1c
|
If I'm ninety and believe I'm forty-five, I'm headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f4759c4
|
The heavy work requiring muscle and the skilled work with crops and sheep was done by Ged, Shandy, and Tenar, while the two old men who had been there all their lives, his father's men took him about and told him how they managed it all, and truly believed they were managing it all, and shared their believe with him.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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2810c01
|
The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper. In other words, that she's free. Not wholly free. Never wholly free. Maybe very partially. Maybe only in this one act, this sitting for a snatched moment being a woman writing, fishing the mind's lake. But in this, responsi..
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women
writing
muse
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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fae7ce7
|
It's your nature to be Tirin, and my nature to be Shevek, and our common nature to be Odonians, responsible to one another. And that responsibility is our freedom. To avoid it, would be to lose our freedom. Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?
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Ursula K. Le Guin |