The quotable Ursula Le Guin
Brain Pickings is surfacing some gems from their archives in honor of what would have been Ursula Le Guin’s 89th birthday. The novelist, poet, and essayist died in January.
Le Guin on conversation:
“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”
“Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.”
Le Guin on time (hear astrophysicist Janna Levin read the full poem):
Time is being and being time, it is all one thing, the shining, the seeing, the dark abounding.
To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future. If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly.
“To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it.”
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