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No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters QUOTES

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters QUOTES

1 " It appears that we've given up on the long-range view. That we've decided not to think about consequences—about cause and effect. Maybe that's why I feel that I live in exile. I used to live in a country that had a future. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

2 " A decision worthy of the name is based on observation, factual information, intellectual and ethical judgment. Opinion—that darling of the press, the politician, and the poll—may be based on no information at all. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

3 " Meaning in art isn’t the same as meaning in science. The meaning of the second law of thermodynamics, so long as the words are understood, isn’t changed by who reads it, or when, or where. The meaning of Huckleberry Finn is. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

4 " Let age be age. Let your old relative or old friend be who they are. Denial serves nothing, no one, no purpose. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

5 " I don’t believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. I accept it. It isn’t a matter of faith, but of evidence. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

6 " Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics. The hell with The Great American Novel. We have all the great novels we need right now—and right now some man or woman is writing a new one we won’t know we needed till we read it. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

7 " Opinion all too often leaves no room for anything but itself. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

8 " Old age generally involves pain and danger and inevitably ends in death. The acceptance of that takes courage. Courage deserves respect. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

9 " Question 14: “Are you living your secret desires?” Floored again. I finally didn’t check Yes, Somewhat, or No, but wrote in “I have none, my desires are flagrant. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

10 " If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

11 " None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

12 " Old age isn’t a state of mind. It’s an existential situation. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

13 " Words are my matter—my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

14 " The daily hummingbird assaults existence with improbability. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

15 " If we insist that in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, we’ve sacrificed right to might. (That’s what History does after most wars, when it applauds the victors for their superior virtue as well as their superior firepower.) If we falsify the terms of the competition, handicapping it, so that the good guys may lose the battle but always win the war, we’ve left the real world, we’re in fantasy land—wishful thinking country. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

16 " Actually, I don’t exactly have expectations. I have hopes, and fears. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

17 " Large, general questions about meaning, etc., can only be answered with generalities, which make me uncomfortable, because it is so hard to be honest when you generalize. If you skip over all the details, how can you tell if you’re being honest or not? "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

18 " Positive thinking founded on denial may not be so great. "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

19 " Can women operate as women in a male institution without becoming imitation men? "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

20 " I’ve never liked the word blog—I suppose it is meant to stand for bio-log or something like that, but it sounds like a sodden tree trunk in a bog, or maybe an obstruction in the nasal passage (Oh, she talks that way because she has such terrible blogs in her nose). "

― Ursula K. Le Guin , No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters