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"I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two people. What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery. So I wrote this book for my friend, with whom I have lived and will die free."
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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 Freedom quotes
"To enjoy the beauty of the world, don't try to fit in. Try to fly out of your perceived boundaries."
"To embrace the message of Christmas is to throw off my hedonistic rebellion and bow before the chafing reality that I can't save myself, and in that very act to be suddenly taken aback in that I've stumbled upon the very freedom I've longed for in the very place I'd least expected it."
"You don't have to allow the drama and events of the economy, others people's lives, and external circumstances to limit your potential and rob you of the life you deserve."
"Be as light as a feather and when they reach for you - you will blow right by their grip, you will effortlessly flow to safety."
"I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded."
"Freedom gives you the air of the high mountains."
"You need to break free from the chain of employment to fully utilize and discover your potential."
"True freedom is a freedom with clear boundaries. True freedom understands the real essence of do's and don'ts. A freedom without restrictions that brings comfort is a freedom in chains."
"Absolute freedom is an illusion. For while an employed man might be free from starvation, he is a slave to his employer's financial aspirations, and, working-hours."
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