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66788b9
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I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
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diversity
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d70f02a
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We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.
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mind
forest
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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e2cd5d0
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But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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bd12604
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It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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3f22328
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If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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00319f0
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We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, n..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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bba7aa2
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I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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baca72d
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For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.
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life
listening
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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77472a9
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Do you see how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls, the universe is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends. The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth and light, all t..
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responsibility
intelligence
equilibrium
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f18ae92
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To hear, one must be silent.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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4038110
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It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.
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magic
fantasy
inspirational
earthsea
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8be779b
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To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.
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political
inspirational
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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32c43ea
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Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.
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sharing
ownership
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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58e6745
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And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life
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work
spiritual
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f7df11a
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Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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36319c5
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The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.
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reading
novel
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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99eb815
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A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection a..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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4c5799f
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No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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59c0b5f
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I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.
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wisdom
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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e9a461a
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My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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e458520
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Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them, all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars. In life is death. In death is rebirth. What then is life without death? Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal?-What is it but death-death without rebirth?
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death
life
equilibrium
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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0fd9979
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Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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c09ad41
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He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a ..
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leguin
banks
banking
economics
capitalism
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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3f006d1
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Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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03facab
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To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.
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laws
crime
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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2912aeb
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What good is power when you're too wise to use it?
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wisdom
restraint
power
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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b6f1521
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For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood but not assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our better journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love. But it was from the difference between us, not from the affini..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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170ef71
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He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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bee444b
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They have nothing to give. They have no power of making. All their power is to darken and destroy. They cannot leave this place; they are this place; and it should be left to them. They should not be denied nor forgotten, but neither should they be worshiped. The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clenc..
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sci-fi
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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9a87a26
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Do you know how to read?' 'No. It is one of the black arts.' He nodded. 'But a useful one,' he said.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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da82ebc
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There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two..
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wall
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6b263af
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To oppose something is to maintain it.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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ea3af83
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If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8bb395c
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He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater detterent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand.
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Ursula K. Le guin |
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c108122
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How does one hate a country, or love one?... 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 a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is the love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7488817
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In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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79f7cdf
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She'll die.' 'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive.
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life
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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45475ee
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To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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5b836ac
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You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the ..
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death
life
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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3cd3c9d
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Please bring strange things. Please come bringing new things. Let very old things come into your hands. Let what you do not know come into your eyes. Let desert sand harden your feet. Let the arch of your feet be the mountains. Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps And the ways you go be the lines of your palms. Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing And your outbreath be the shining of ice. May your mouth contain the shapes of ..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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5906ac0
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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.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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aeaf37a
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We men dream dreams, we work magic, we do good, we do evil. The dragons do not dream. They are dreams. They do not work magic: it is their substance, their being. They do not do; they are.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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2b3c2b4
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In war everybody is a prisoner.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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47c335a
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I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?
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glory
home
stories
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Ursula K. Le Guin |