*Ursula Le Guin edition – I am embarrassed to admit I’ve never read LeGuin, as I generally avoid fantasy and sci-fi, but – her words, quoted everywhere, inspire me, always, when I discover them. Eventually, I must must must get to it, read her classic works. It’s time.
Change is freedom, change is life. It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don’t make changes, don’t risk disapproval, don’t upset your syndics. It’s always easiest to let yourself be governed.
There’s a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities. Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls.
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
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.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
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.
