Rebekah > Rebekah's Quotes

“They were difficult things to unmake, dreamers. So much of a dreamer didn't exist inside a physical body. So many complicated parts of them snarled in the stars and tangled in tree roots. So much of them fled down rivers and exploded through the air between raindrops.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand
outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn't work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“Saying that, he was suddenly himself again, despite his lunatic hair and eyes: a man whose personal dignity went so deep as to be nearly invisible...
It was more than diginity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved.
The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“From what we are, spirit; from what we do, matter. Matter and spirit are one.”
― Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife

“What is the world of the spirits? It is nothing I know about. I don't know what spirit is."
"Spirit is what matter does.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out; enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“If you are a monster, stand up.
If you are a monster, a trickster, a fiend,
If you’ve built a steam-powered wishing machine
If you have a secret, a dark past, a scheme,
If you kidnap maidens or dabble in dreams
Come stand by me.

If you have been broken, stand up.
If you have been broken, abandoned, alone
If you have been starving, a creature of bone
If you live in a tower, a dungeon, a throne
If you weep for wanting, to be held, to be known,
Come stand by me.

If you are a savage, stand up.
If you are a witch, a dark queen, a black knight,
If you are a mummer, a pixie, a sprite,
If you are a pirate, a tomcat, a wright,
If you swear by the moon and you fight the hard fight,
Come stand by me.

If you are a devil, stand up.
If you are a villain, a madman, a beast,
If you are a strowler, a prowler, a priest,
If you are a dragon come sit at our feast,
For we all have stripes, and we all have horns,
We all have scales, tails, manes, claws and thorns
And here in the dark is where new worlds are born.
Come stand by me.”
― Catherynne M. Valente

“To enter with heart and mind into the world of the imagination may be to head deliberately and directly toward, or back toward, engagement with the real world.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Tombs of Atuan

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
― Edward Abbey

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human. We”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people. Human beings have always joined in groups to imagine”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“No matter how humble the spirit it’s offered in, a sermon is an act of aggression.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“I hold it self-evident that so long as we live in a man’s world, as we still do, women have a right to create enclaves of learning or work where, instead of obeying or imitating what men do and want, women can shape what they do, how they do it, and why they do it, in their own way and on their own terms.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“Words are my matter. I have chipped one stone for thirty years and still it is not done, that image of the thing I cannot see. I cannot finish it and set it free, transformed to energy.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shouting rush of the media. You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you fast and hard and loud in order to overwhelm and control you.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.
Human beings have always joined in groups to imagine how best to live and help one another carry out the plan. The essential function of human community is to arrive at some agreement on what we need, what life ought to be, what we want our children to learn, and then to collaborate in learning and teaching so that we and they can go on the way we think is the right way.
Small communities with strong traditions are often clear about the way they want to go, and good at teaching it. But tradition may crystallize imagination to the point of fossilizing it as dogma and forbidding new ideas. Larger communities, such as cities, open up room for people to imagine alternatives, learn from people of different traditions, and invent their own ways to live.
As alternatives proliferate, however, those who take the responsibility of teaching find little social and moral consensus on what they should be teaching -- what we need, what life ought to be. In our time of huge populations exposed continuously to reproduced voices, images, and words used for commercial and political profit, there are too many people who want to and can invent us, own us, shape and control us through seductive and powerful media. It's a lot to ask of a child to find a way through all that alone.
Nobody can do anything very much, really, alone.
What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.”
― Ursula K Le Guin

“But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. I beg you to see what it is that we must save, and not to let the bigots and misogynists take it away from us again. Save what we won: our children. You who are young, before it's too late, save your children.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“To describe society since the mid twentieth century -- global, multilingual, infinitely interlinked -- we need the global, intuitional language of fantasy.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it. Right now I'm living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“It seems you can only describe beauty by describing something else, the way you can only see the earliest star after sunset by not looking directly at it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness -- not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it -- everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not "interactive" with a set of rules or options, as games are: reading is actual collaborating with the writer's mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“Electrons are as evanescent as thoughts. History begins with the written word.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“I told you Grandfather is easy. Tom, I mean my father, is the same: they don’t put barriers against me. It is Grandmother, it is always other women, apart from you, who put up barriers against girls and on themselves. I know men can be tyrants, but a lot of women are nasty to women – everybody says it, unless you have not met Jjajja Nsangi, Grandfather’s sister.’ ‘Kirabo, have you seen God come down from heaven to make humans behave?’ ‘No.’ ‘That is because some people have appointed themselves his police. And I tell you, child, the police are far worse than God himself. That is why the day you catch your man with another woman, you will go for the woman and not him. My grandmothers called it kweluma. That is when oppressed people turn on each other or on themselves and bite. It is as a form of relief. If you cannot bite your oppressor, you bite yourself.”
― Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, The First Woman