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Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (displaying: 1 - 30 of 384 quotes)

Ursula K. Le Guin
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He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anaresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work -- his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy -- and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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 clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in me?s eyes.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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As for ideology, the Hell with it.All of it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There were actually very few men who could face reality when the going got tough.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Time is not duration but intensity; time is the beat and the interval [...]
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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You can keep up that crap for years. But it finally catches up with you. And then you realise all you've done is save your shit to drown in.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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but you're not a traitor, you've merely been the tool of one. I don't punish tools. They do harm only in the hands of a bad workman.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is 'superior' to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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 and of sociality as a whole.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal, The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell. Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings. It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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For discipline is the channel in which our acts run strong and deep; where there is no direction, the deeds of men run shallow and wander and are wasted.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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They can send death at once, but life is slower...
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I suppose the Valley of the Na, in Always Coming Home, is where I think I'd most like to live; but that's partly because I did live there, all the summers of my childhood.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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 we part.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Saying that, he was suddenly himself again, despite his lunatic hair and eyes: a man whose personal dignity went so deep as to be nearly invisible...It was more than diginity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved.The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Jungians such as Joseph Campbell have generalised such journeys into a set of archetypal events and images. Though they can be useful in criticism, I mistrust them as fatally reductive.?Ah, the Night Sea Voyage? we cry, feeling that we have understood something important? but w?ve merely recognised it. Until we are actually on that voyage, we have understood nothing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Yet we were rescued by that fancy, and saved by a myth.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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 something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book."(Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading, Harper's Magazine, February 2008)
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I tried to think about what he had asked me to do, to step so far beyond myself. I found it difficult to think about. It was as if it hung over me, this huge choice I must make, this future I could not imagine.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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