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"It takes a while to spoil a world, but it can be done."
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Explore more quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
"Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever."
"Somewhere in the notes Estraven wrote during our trek across the Gobrin Ice he wonders why his companion is ashamed to cry. I could have told him even then that it was not shame so much as fear. Now I went on through the Sinoth Valley, through the evening of his death, into the cold country that lies beyond fear. There I found you can weep all you like, but there's no good in it."
"If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them. Their inexperience saved the passenger's life."
"The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them."
"We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone."
"Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new."
"Cinders patter, falling with the snow. We creep infinitesimally northward through the dirty chaos of a world in the process of making itself. Praise then Creation unfinished!"
"I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved nothing except perhaps a rather subtler point."
Exlpore more Environment quotes
"An environment of infinite economic expansion is unsustainable in a world of finite resources."
"Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city."
"Environmental cleanliness begins with each individual desire to be clean."
"In a natural environment, nature controls the breeding cycles. In the man-made environment, abnormal environmental conditions control the unnatural breeding cycles."
"The blue of daylightfades and chills as the sun sinksbeneath clouds of fire."
"If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."
"The addition of certain chemicals to the atmosphere will destroy wavelengths of light and it may only be a matter of time before one of these wavelengths of light that is critical for human survival is eliminated. This is called: The Extinction Wavelength."
"There can never be any real freedom on earth as long as people try to exert ownership over the natural resources of the world."
"The human will be the only mammal in history to fully understand that its own self inflicted extinction is well underway."
"Environmental radiation research is the rent I pay for living on this planet."
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