No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Encouragement by denial, however well-meaning, backfires.

we cry, feeling that we have understood something important—but we’ve merely recognized it. Until we are actually on that voyage, we have understood nothing.

Didn’t the child dead in the ruins of a bombed village die for her country just as any soldier does?

a soul enters life forgetting its eternal being, can remember it throughout life only in intimations and moments of revelation, and will recall and rejoin it fully only in death.

they’re innovative because they have something new to say and know how to say it. They are obedient only to their own certainties.

We are social by nature, and thrive only in community. It is entirely unnatural for a human being to live long completely alone.