If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.


Ursula K. Le Guin

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It is a lie.
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The Sun Going South

In late sunshine I wander troubled.
Restless I wander in autumn ...
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Ignore donkeys and other naysayers!
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When you give, you will be blessed. When you give, it will be given back to you.
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If you can do it, why you won't do it???
If you have chance why you won't use it?
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If you don't think it.
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If you have knowledge, then use it for educating not for degrading.
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Something did happen, and I really don't feel proud of it.
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If you're not really having a good time, it's not worth it.
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Worrying helps you some—it seems as if you were doing something when you're worrying.
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This Stone

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that doesn't lead to death.
He went looki...
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who wants flowers when youre dead? nobody.
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Find something that makes you happy and go for it.
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If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it.
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I like this place and could willingly waste my time in it.
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You've gotta go for it, and go for it with gusto.
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How to get it, I annoy you???
You are not interested???

What's the idea???
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Have a robust mindset; dare to move any mountain!
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH

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To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
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It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say ...
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If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don...
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As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we a...
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To oppose something is to maintain it.
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When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
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In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, th...
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The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in wo...
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Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain...
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.
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I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust every...
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Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, m...
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The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is...
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The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, make...
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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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Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.
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It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.
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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps chan...
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If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a...
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Heaven and earth
begin in the unnamed:
name’s the mother
of the ten thousand things...
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What is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where th...
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They have nothing to give. They have no power of making. All their power is to darken and destroy. T...
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He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to...
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When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
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It is what it looks like and is called. A jail. it is not a front for something else, not a facade, ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet I would remember that once I saw the...
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I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
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But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
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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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Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made ...
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Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't ...
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering hap...
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I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, b...
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Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.
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If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what come...
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No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very...
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But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil ...
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People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
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The creative adult is the child who has survived.
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He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.
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There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult ...
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When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, ...
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I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you lea...
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Not even need and love can defeat fate...
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The best I can say, it's like this. A man's in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell ... It's hard ...
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A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words a...
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Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not ...
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I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I...
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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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"In innocence there is no strength against evil," said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. "But there is ...
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I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow...
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I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.
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But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord."

"It might to keep it open.
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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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War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to �...
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Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on th...
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War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to �...
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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 ...
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You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. An...
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I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
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It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
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I bid your voice be dumb until the day you find a word worth speaking.
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He was born to be alone, a damned cold intellectual, an egoist.
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Independence was as far as his mind could reach. Yet I think his mind groped further, towards what h...
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I use your love as a man burns a candle, burns it away, to light his steps.
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I was with you at the beginning of your journey. It is right that I should follow you to its end.
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But I can't say that gratitude was my motive for infringing on the Law of Cultural Embargo. I was no...
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To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it ...
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering hap...
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'The fact is,' I said, 'that you're unable, or unwilling, to believe in the fact that I believe in ...
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The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of a...
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He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quit...
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He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But ...
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The Encyclopedia Planaria, in forty-four volumes, is not portable, and after all, what is entirely r...
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To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.
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Ged saw all these things from outside and apart, alone, and his heart was very heavy in him, though ...
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To light a candle is to cast a shadow...
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Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of wh...
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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what come...
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You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is...
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If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words eve...
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If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their ...
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They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go t...
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Ai taught me a Terran game played on squares with little stones, called go, an excellent difficult g...
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The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Se...
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Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they g...
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My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and go...
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The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only...
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There are talking dogs all over the place, unbelievably boring they are, on and on and on about sex ...
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Oh, Hank," Susan whispered, "their wings are furry."

"Oh, James," Harriet whispered, "the...
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Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful functio...
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They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the
darkness, and they do not come back. The place they...
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Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that w...
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A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean w...
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This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.
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My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.
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Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your min...
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The little Otak was hiding in the rafters of the house, as it did when strangers entered. There it s...
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I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what al...
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When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at th...
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I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what al...
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Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgot...
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We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we...
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To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful...
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In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helpl...
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Which is better off, a lizard basking in the sun or a philosopher?
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My dogs have barked at a beggar tonight and he proves a prince of starlight.
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... “Dangerous!” Vea laughed radiantly. “What an utterly marvellous compliment! Why am I dange...
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Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Eith...
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We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law bu...
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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns ...
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Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, ...
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While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't the...
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An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet ...
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I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.
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The prisoner is the jailer's jailer.
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There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else...
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What good is power when you're too wise to use it?
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Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?
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But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.
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Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.
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A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is ...
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To use the enemy's weapon is to play the enemy's game...speak the truth and hear the truth.
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Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life...
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We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the fore...
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In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge ...
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To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; the...
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In feudal times the aristocracy had sent their sons to university, conferring superiority on the ins...
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Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicor...
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Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It ...
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His words cost him so much, she thought, not like hers that just came dancing out of the air and wen...
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On the blank leaf glued to the inner back cover I drew the double curve within the circle, and black...
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Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still th...
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There must be darkness to see the stars.
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The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying.
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The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, ...
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We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel......
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A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice
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And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to p...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
«I am tired,» he said. «I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever d...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: t...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsi...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issu...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I wr...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
This Stone

He went looking for a road
that doesn't lead to death.
He went looki...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
So maybe the difference isn't language. Maybe it's this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do a...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
What are we so afraid of? Why don't we let 'em tell us we're afraid? What is it they're afraid of?" ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Why are men afraid of women?"
If your strength is only the other's weakness, you live in fear,"...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Orr had a tendency to assume that people knew what they were doing, perhaps because he generally ass...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
I don’t like making the rest of the world live in my dreams, but I certainly don’t want to live ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
They made love. Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made al...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Praise God from whom all blessings flow, including good-natured men.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
An irrelevant and poignant sensation of pleasure rose in him, like a tree that grew up and flowered ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his in...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
On top of pique, umbrage, and ennui. Oh, the French diseases of the soul.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
It was more than dignity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved. The infinite possib...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the b...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, rec...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the ti...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, an...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Saying that, he was suddenly himself again, despite his lunatic hair and eyes: a man whose personal ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand
outside things and run them...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the ti...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatene...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV se...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
I never knew a person who reacted so wholly and rapidly to a changed situation as Estraven. I was re...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
We make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build ...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that di...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in eit...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Truth is a matter of the imagination.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without ca...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
He said after a little while, 'I see why you say that only men do evil, I think. Even sharks are inn...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibi...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
For discipline is the channel in which our acts run strong and deep; where there is no direction, th...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
I am tired of safe places, and roofs, and walls around me.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
In Enlad," said Arren after a while, "we have a story about the boy whose schoolmaster
was a st...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
But when we crave power over life—endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality—then desire b...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
What is evil?" asked the younger man. The round web, with its black center, seemed to watch them bot...
URSULA K. LE GUIN
To see a candle’s light, one must take it into a dark place.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Yet we were rescued by that fancy, and saved by a myth.
URSULA K. LE GUIN