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e72ffe4
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If you play against your own side you'll lose the whole game.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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1314fc4
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This is morally problematic when personal decision is confused with personal opinion.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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dd04eff
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I am not sure who I am," I said cautiously. "Many people never are," she said. "But it doesn't matter, you know. If for one moment of your whole life you know that you are, then that's your life, that moment, that's unnua, that's all. In a short life I saw my mother's face, like the sun. So I'm here. In a long life I went there and there and there; but I dug in the garden, the root of a weed came up in my hand, so I am unnua. When you get o..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8f0faf5
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The fact that the Hegnish have absolutely no interest in any people except themselves can also cause offense, or even rage. Foreigners exist. That is all the Hegnish know about them, and all they care to know. They are too polite to say that it is a pity that foreigners exist, but if they had to think about it, they would think so.
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foreigners
nationalism
xenophobia
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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3b9f138
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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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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a4765cb
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To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here "all roads to Mishnory". To be sure, if you turn back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitable to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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27ff55b
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The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don't know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It's occupied by living. An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily maintenance, which is tiresome. But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with ..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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e9455da
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In the big, crowded, noisy room where golden suns swam on the walls and the years and Years were told on golden dials, he searched for the alien, the stranger, his wife.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a5d6552
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Ve sonra, eger bana ihtiyacin olursa, beni cagir. Gelirim. Beni cagirirsan, mezarimdan bile cikar gelirim Tenar ! Ama seninle kalamam.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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2de9fd9
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I found an entry for the Beidr, of the Unon Plane, an aggressive and enterprising people with highly advanced material technologies, who have been in trouble more than once with the Interplanary Agency for interfering on other planes. The tourist guidebook gives them the symbols that mean "of special interest to engineers, computer programmers, and systems analysts.")"
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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bea6450
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Old Age Is Not for the Young.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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c6dab6b
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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.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f6f22c7
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Akilliya soru gerekmez; aptal ise bosuna sorar." -38"
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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acc38be
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Wakeful Islanded Snow and silence in the streets. Winter in the bone. In silent houses people sleep. each one alone. Self-islanded by thought and dream the solitary soul forgets the deepest depth, the earth that joins us all.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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3f8d1ad
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He was putting on his old clothes, and as he pulled the shirt over his head he saw the doctor stuff the blue and yellow "sleeping clothes" into the "trash" bin. Shevek puased, the collar still over his nose. He emerged fully, knelt, and opened the bin. It was empty. "The clothes are burned?" Oh, those are cheap pajamas, service issue- wear 'em and throw 'em away, it costs less than cleaning." "It costs less," Shevek repeated meditatively...
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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0363817
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put it this way: fiction--writing it, reading it--is an act of the imagination.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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c210198
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As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep. I was not sleepy, yet. I would go east to the Fastnesses, and gather information from the Foretellers, perhaps.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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9965794
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A woman's a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen, mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark.
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inspirational
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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0af1910
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It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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77c868a
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No matter how humble the spirit it's offered in, a sermon is an act of aggression.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f15d2c2
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Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors beside battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing right do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fantasy is good at thinking about these other ways. Could we assume, for a change, that it does so?" (p. 7)"
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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67f0333
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I see life as a shared gift, received from others and passed on to others, living and dying as one process, in which lies both our suffering and our reward. Without mortality to purchase it, how can we have the consciousness of eternity? I think the price is worth paying.
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death
eternity
grief
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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717d9a8
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When there's no social pressure behind it, respectful behavior becomes a decision, an individual choice.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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3f451dc
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Cultural shock was nothing much compared to the biological shock I suffered as a human male among human beings who were, five-sixths of the time, hermaphroditic neuters.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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dbaa091
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Because she too was an Odonian, and the separation of means and ends was, to her too, false. For her as for him, there was no end. There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping anywhere. All responsibilities, all commitments thus understood took on substance and duration.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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3e67f29
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By the time I wrote this book I needed to look at heroics from outside and underneath, from the point of view of the people who are not included. The ones who can't do magic. The ones who don't have shining staffs or swords. Women, kids, the poor, the old, the powerless. Unheroes, ordinary people--my people. I didn't want to change Earthsea, but I needed to see what Earthsea looked like to us.
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elderly
feminism
heroes
heroics
heroism
women
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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5f7be5b
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On the second night all creatures woke, and the sleepless cricket was silent suddenly. The thunder spoke from ridge to ridge, from canyon to canyon, far, then nearer. Darkness split wide open to reveal what it hides. Only for a moment can the eyes of the creatures see the world in that awful light.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6a1b213
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual,
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life-lessons
pain
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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1d9948b
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I wish we could stop using the word belief in matters of fact, leaving it where it belongs, in matters of religious faith and secular hope. I believe we'd avoid a lot of unnecessary pain if we did so.
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science
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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629397b
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My mother was mad, but I was not. My father was old, but I was young. Like Spartan Hellen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn't be given, wouldn't be taken, but chose my man and my fate.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7728077
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But the fact is that, starting with Plato's Republic in Philosophy 1-A when I was seventeen, I read utopias as novels. Actually, I still read everything as novels, including history, memoir, and the newspaper.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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634cfc9
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Esta calamidad asolando las tierras. Las artes del hombre olvidadas. El cantor enmudecido. El ojo ciego. ?Y entonces? Un falso rey reinando. Reinando para siempre. Y sobre los mismos subditos para siempre. No mas nacimientos; no mas vidas nuevas. No mas ninos. Solo lo que es mortal engendra vida, Arren. Solo en la muerte hay renacimiento. El Equilibrio no es inmovilidad. Es un movimiento... un eterno devenir.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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715c1a2
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To him a thinking man's job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a2410c9
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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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75dc9b0
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I like men very much, but sometimes ... they're so stupid, so stuffed with theories .... They go in straight lines only, and won't stop. It's dangerous to do that. It's dangerous to leave everything up to the men, you know. That's one reason why I'd like to go home, at least for a visit. To see what Elia with his theories, and my dear young Lev with his ideals, are up to. I get worried they'll go too fast and too straight and get us into a ..
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men
straight-lines
women
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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5c00d09
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His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8751178
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Pregnant women have no ethics.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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aa79b59
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He was aware that in thus relegating to irrelity a major portion of the only reality, the only existence, that he in fact did have, he was running exactly the same risk the insane mind runs: the lossof the sense of free will. He knew that in so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void. But the void was there. This life lacked realness; it was hollow; ..
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reality
science-fiction
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8a36fd8
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His words cost him so much, she thought, not like hers that just came dancing out of the air and went back into it. He spoke from his marrow. It made what he said a solemn compliment, which she accepted gratefully...
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solemnity
speech
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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0132601
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When I take you to the Valley, you'll see the blue hills on the left and the blue hills on the right, the rainbow and the vineyards under the rainbow late in the rainy season, and maybe you'll say, "There it is, that's it!" But I'll say. "A little farther." We'll go on, I hope, and you'll see the roofs of the little towns and the hillsides yellow with wild oats, a buzzard soaring and a woman singing by the shadows of a creek in the dry seas..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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e0ed3b1
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He listened to the radio, but it would not listen to him. He was all alone, and nothing seemed to be real in solitude. He needed somebody, anybody, to talk to, he had to tell them what he felt so that he knew if he felt anything.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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ebb70ea
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To enter with heart and mind into the world of the imagination may be to head deliberately and directly toward, or back toward, engagement with the real world.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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578678c
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What can you do to evil but refuse it? Not pretend it isn't there, but look at it, and know it, and refuse it. Punishment, what is punishment? Getting even, schoolboy stuff. The Bible God, vengeance is mine! And then it flips over and goes too far the other way, forgive them for they know not what they do. Who does know? I don't. But I have tried to know. I don't forgive a person who doesn't try to know, doesn't want to know if he does evil..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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0962c83
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I was afraid I'd fail. So I didn't work.'
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Ursula K. Le Guin |