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Morning Comes Whether You Set The Alarm Or Not.
-Ursula K. Le Guin
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Morning Comes Whether You

Ursula K. Le Guin
...
Morning Comes Whether You Set The Alarm Or Not.

Understanding the Quote: "morning comes whether you set the alarm or not...."

This quote by Ursula K. Le Guin reflects deeply on the theme of funny. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Funny, Good Morning, Good Day, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Ursula K. Le Guin interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin is celebrated for insightful thoughts on funny and good morning. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Funny
Good Morning
Good Day
More From Ursula K. Le Guin
It Is No Secret. All Power Is One In Source And End, I Think. Years And Distances, Stars And Candles, Water And Wind And Wizardry, The Craft In A Man's Hand And The Wisdom In A Tree's Root: They All Arise Together. My Name, And Yours, And The True Name Of The Sun, Or A Spring Of Water, Or An Unborn Child, All Are Syllables Of The Great Word That Is Very Slowly Spoken By The Shining Of The Stars. There Is No Other Power. No Other Name.
Stars
Children
Distance
What Is A Body That Casts No Shadow? Nothing, A Formlessness, Two-dimensional, A Comic-strip Character. If I Deny My Own Profound Relationship With Evil I Deny My Own Reality. I Cannot Do, Or Make; I Can Only Undo, Unmake.
Character
Reality
Two
There Are No Right Answers To Wrong Questions.
Peace
Asking Questions
Questions And Answers
Stories Are What Death Thinks He Puts An End To. He Can't Understand That They End In Him, But They Don't End With Him.
Thinking
Stories
Ends
Fantasy Is Probably The Oldest Literary Device For Talking About Reality.
Reality
Talking
Fantasy
...fiction Is Made Out Of The Writer's Experience, His Whole Life From Infancy On, Everything He's Thought And Done And Seen And Read And Dreamed. But Experience Isn't Something You Go And Get - It's A Gift, And The Only Prerequisite For Receiving It Is That You Be Open To It. A Closed Soul Can Have The Most Immense Adventures, Go Through A Civil War Or A Trip To The Moon, And Have Nothing To Show For All That "experience"; Whereas The Open Soul Can Do Wonders With Nothing.
War
Adventure
Moon
Any Human Power Can Be Resisted And Changed By Human Beings
Divine Right
Changed
Humans
I Can Never Get Used To The Fact, Though I Know It, That Women Are Born Cynics. Men Have To Learn Cynicism. Infant Girls Could Teach It To Them.
Girl
Men
Facts
There Is No Kingdom Like The Forests.
Kingdoms
Forests
Sleeping People Are So Remote.... Right Here, But Out Of Communication. That's What Strikes Humans As Uncanny About Sleep. Its Utter Privacy. The Sleeper Turns His Back On Everyone.
Communication
Sleep
People
Besides, When You Say You're A Feminist It Annoys The Bigots And The Old Farts And The Prissy Ladies So Much, It's Kind Of Irresistible.
Feminist
Kind
Annoying
What You Love, You Will Love. What You Undertake You Will Complete. You Are A Fulfiller Of Hope; You Are To Be Relied On. But Seventeen Years Give Little Armor Against Despair...consider, Arren. To Refuse Death Is To Refuse Life.
Life
Love You
Years
In Many College English Courses The Words “myth” And “symbol” Are Given A Tremendous Charge Of Significance. You Just Ain’t No Good Unless You Can See A Symbol Hiding, Like A Scared Gerbil, Under Every Page. And In Many Creative Writing Course The Little Beasts Multiply, The Place Swarms With Them. What Does This Mean? What Does That Symbolize? What Is The Underlying Mythos? Kids Come Lurching Out Of Such Courses With A Brain Full Of Gerbils. And They Sit Down And Write A Lot Of Empty Pomposity, Under The Impression That That’s How Melville Did It.
Kids
Writing
Mean
Crankish Attacks On The Freedom To Read Are Common At Present. When Backed And Coordinated By Organized Groups, They Become Sinister.
Groups
Common
Sinister
The Old Knowledge Had Been Difficult But Not Distressing. It Had Been All Paradox And Myth, And It Had Made Sense. The New Knowledge Was All Fact And Reason, And It Made No Sense.
Facts
Paradox
Reason
No Matter How Intelligent A Man Is, He Can't See What He Doesn't Know How To See.
Intelligent
Men
Matter
Statesmen Remember Things Selectively.
Remember
Statesmen
I Think," Tehanu Said In Her Soft, Strange Voice, "that When I Die, I Can Breathe Back The Breath That Made Me Live. I Can Give Back To The World All That I Didn't Do. All That I Might Have Been And Couldn't Be. All The Choices I Didn't Make. All The Things I Lost And Spent And Wasted. I Can Give Them Back To The World. To The Lives That Haven't Been Lived Yet. That Will Be My Gift Back To The World That Gave Me The Life I Did Live, The Love I Loved, The Breath I Breathed.
Loss
Thinking
Voice
What Is An Anarchist? One Who, Choosing, Accepts The Responsibility Of Choice.
Responsibility
Choices
Anarchist
It Is Not Human To Be Without Shame And Without Desire.
Desire
Shame
Humans
Resistance And Change Often Begin In Art, And Very Often In Our Art - The Art Of Words.
Art
Divine Right
Resistance
Nothing Said In Words Ever Came Out Quite Even. Things In Words Got Twisted And Ran Together, Instead Of Staying Straight And Fitting Together.
Together
Twisted
Fitting
As A Kitten Does What All Other Kittens Do, So A Child Wants To Do What Other Children Do, With A Wanting That Is As Powerful As It Is Mindless. Since We Human Beings Have To Learn What We Do, We Have To Start Out That Way, But Human Mindfulness Begins Where That Wish To Be The Same Leaves Off.
Children
Powerful
Wish
Time Has Two Aspects. There Is The Arrow, The Running River, Without Which There Is No Change, No Progress, Or Direction, Or Creation. And There Is The Circle Or The Cycle, Without Which There Is Chaos, Meaningless Succession Of Instants, A World Without Clocks Or Seasons Or Promises.
Running
Time
Circles
The Same Old Hypocrisy. Life Is A Fight, And The Strongest Wins. All Civilization Does Is Hide The Blood And Cover Up The Hate With Pretty Words!
Hate
Fighting
Winning
But Need Alone Is Not Enough To Set Power Free: There Must Be Knowledge.
Needs
Enough
What Children Don't Understand, And Can't Understand Until They Grow Up Some, Is How Much The Whole Fabric And Process Of Human Society Depends On Everybody Agreeing To Ignore, Most Of The Time, The Fact That All Of Us Are, Most Of The Time, Inadequate, Incompetent, Pitiful, And, In Fact, Naked To Our Enemies. None Of Us Really Has Very Much In The Way Of Spiritual, Moral Clothing. We Dress Ourselves In Rags. And We Agree To Say Nothing About It. To A Very Large Extent, It Is Human Charity That Clothes Us.
Spiritual
Children
Growing Up
A Forest Ecology Is A Delicate One. If The Forest Perishes, Its Fauna May Go With It. The Athshean Word For World Is Also The Word For Forest.
May
Forests
World
Hardly Anybody Ever Writes Anything Nice About Introverts. Extroverts Rule. This Is Rather Odd When You Realise That About Nineteen Writers Out Of Twenty Are Introverts. We Are Been Taught To Be Ashamed Of Not Being 'outgoing'. But A Writer's Job Is Ingoing.
Jobs
Nice
Writing
What Else Can The Young Be? When You Are On The Bottom, You Must Organize From The Bottom Up
Young
Organize
Bottom
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.
Wind Blowing
Matter
Fields
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.
Light
Choices Made
May
When You Light A Candle, You Also Cast A Shadow.
Light
Darkness
Shadow
Most Civilisations, Perhaps, Look Shinier In General Terms And From Several Light-years Away.
Light
Years
Looks
Artists Are People Who Are Not At All Interested In The Facts - Only In The Truth.
Artist
People
Facts
The Great Authors Share Their Souls With Us- "literally.
Writing
Soul
Share
The Only Questions That Really Matter Are The Ones You Ask Yourself.
Being Yourself
Matter
Asking Yourself Questions
I'll Make My Report As If I Told A Story, For I Was Taught As A Child On My Homeworld That Truth Is A Matter Of The Imagination.
Children
Imagination
Stories
Any Artist Must Expect To Work Amid The Total, Rational Indifference Of Everybody Else To Their Work, For Years, Perhaps For Life.
Artist
Years
Indifference
To Break A Promise Is To Deny The Reality Of The Past. Therefore It Is To Deny The Hope Of A Real Future.
Positive
Real
Past
If A Book Were Written All In Numbers, It Would Be True. It Would Be Just. Nothing Said In Words Ever Came Out Quite Even. Things In Words Got Twisted And Ran Together, Instead Of Staying Straight And Fitting Together. But Underneath The Words, At The Center, Like The Center Of The Square, It All Came Out Even. Everything Could Change, Yet Nothing Would Be Lost. If You Saw The Numbers You Could See That, The Balance, The Pattern. You Saw The Foundations Of The World. And They Were Solid.
Book
Numbers
Squares
If You're A Fiction Writer, Though, I Can Tell You How To Let People Talk Through You. Listen. Just Be Quiet, And Listen. Let The Character Talk. Don't Censor, Don't Control. Listen, And Write.
Writing
Character
People
I Talk About The Gods, I Am An Atheist. But I Am An Artist Too, And Therefore A Liar. Distrust Everything I Say. I Am Telling The Truth.
Atheist
Liars
Artist
To Learn Which Questions Are Unanswerable, And Not To Answer Them: This Skill Is Most Needful In Times Of Stress And Darkness.
Stress
Skills
Darkness
There Is No Information About Corporations. There Is Only Disinformation.
Corporations
Information
Art And Entertainment Are The Same Thing, In That The More Deeply And Genuinely Entertaining A Work Is, The Better Art It Is. To Imply That Art Is Something Heavy And Solemn And Dull, And Entertainment Is Modest But Jolly And Popular, Is Neo-victorian Idiocy At Its Worst.
Art
Dull
Entertainment
We Read Books To Find Out Who We Are.
Book
Discovery
Self Understanding
I Think There Is No Way To Write About Being Alone. To Write Is To Tell Something To Somebody To Communicate To Others. . . . Solitude Is Noncommunication, The Absence Of Others, The Presence Of A Self Sufficient To Itself.
Writing
Thinking
Self
What She Needs, At Least One Thing She Needs, Is Companionship. After All Why Should She Eat? Who Needs Her To Be Alive? What We Call Psychosis Is Sometimes Simply Realism. But Human Beings Can't Live On Realism Alone.
Psychosis
Needs
Alive
It's Not A Weapon Or A Woman Can Make A Man, Or Magery Either, Or Any Power, Anything But Himself.
Men
Weapons
Either Or
Truth Is A Matter Of The Imagination. The Soundest Fact May Fail Or Prevail In The Style Of Its Telling: Like That Singular Organic Jewel Of Our Seas, Which Grows Brighter As One Woman Wears It And, Worn By Another, Dulls And Goes To Dust.
Dust
Jewels
Sea
Absolute Freedom Is Absolute Responsibility.
Freedom
Responsibility
Absolute Freedom
Lying Is The Misuse Of Language. We Know That. We Need To Remember That It Works The Other Way Round Too. Even With The Best Intentions, Language Misused, Language Used Stupidly, Carelessly, Brutally, Language Used Wrongly, Breeds Lies, Half-truths, Confusion. In That Sense You Can Say That Grammar Is Morality. And It Is In That Sense That I Say A Writer's First Duty Is To Use Language Well.
Lying
Confusion
Needs
I Have No Control Over My Writing. I Have Lots Of Good Intentions, But No Control. There's A Story That Wants To Be Told.
Writing
Stories
Want
Without War There Are No Heroes. What Harm Would That Be? Oh, Lavinia, What A Woman's Question That Is.
War
Hero
Lavinia
The Quality Of The Will To Power Is, Precisely, Growth. Achievement Is Its Cancellation. To Be, The Will To Power Must Increase With Each Fulfillment, Making The Fulfillment Only A Step To A Further One. The Vaster The Power Gained The Vaster The Appetite For More.
Power
Achievement
Growth
Her Concern With Landscapes And Living Creatures Was Passionate. This Concern, Feebly Called, "the Love Of Nature" Seemed To Shevek To Be Something Much Broader Than Love. There Are Souls, He Thought, Whose Umbilicus Has Never Been Cut. They Never Got Weaned From The Universe. They Do Not Understand Death As An Enemy; They Look Forward To Rotting And Turning Into Humus. It Was Strange To See Takver Take A Leaf Into Her Hand, Or Even A Rock. She Became An Extension Of It, It Of Her.
Cutting
Rocks
Hands
O Foolish Writer. Now Moves. Even In Storytime, Dreamtime, Once-upon-a-time, Now Isn't Then.
Time
Moving
Foolish
The Menopause Is Probably The Least Glamorous Topic Imaginable; And This Is Interesting, Because It Is One Of The Very Few Topics To Which Cling Some Shreds And Remnants Of Taboo. A Serious Mention Of Menopause Is Usually Met With Uneasy Silence; A Sneering Reference To It Is Usually Met With Relieved Sniggers. Both The Silence And The Sniggering Are Pretty Sure Indications Of Taboo.
Interesting
Silence
Topics
Art, Like Sex, Cannot Be Carried On Indefinitely Solo; After All, They Have The Same Enemy, Sterility.
Art
Sex
Enemy
Realism Is A Very Sophisticated Form Of Literature, A Very Grown-up One. And That May Be Its Weakness. But Fantasy Seems To Be Eternal And Omnipresent And Always Attractive To Kids.
Kids
Literature
May
Sci-fi Uses The Images That Sf - Starting With H.g. Wells - Made Familiar: Space Travel, Aliens, Galactic Wars And Federations, Time Machines, Et Cetera, Taking Them Literally, Not Caring If They Are Possible Or Even Plausible. It Has No Interest In Or Relation To Real Science Or Technology. It's Fantasy In Space Suits. Spectacle. Wizards With Lasers. Kids With Ray Guns. I've Written Both, But I Have To Say I Respect Science Fiction Enough That I Wince When People Call It Sci-fi.
Real
War
Kids
If It Were Proven That There Is No God There Would Be No Religion. ...but Also If It Were Proven That There Is A God, There Would Be No Religion.
Inspirational
Life
God
I Think What's Happening Is, It's All - Fantasy, Science Fiction, Ghosts, Trolls, Whatever - Finally Being Called, Being Admitted To Be Literature. The Way It Used To Be, Before The Realists And The Bloody Modernists Took Over.
Thinking
Way
Fiction
Claude Levi-strauss Has Been A Great Source Of Fruitful Irritation To My Mind.
Irritation
Mind
Levi Strauss
Translation Is Entirely Mysterious. Increasingly I Have Felt That The Art Of Writing Is Itself Translating, Or More Like Translating Than It Is Like Anything Else
Art
Writing
Mysterious
See, The Thing Is, As A Writer You Are Free. You Are About The Freest Person That Ever Was. Your Freedom Is What You Have Bought With Your Solitude, Your Loneliness.
Loneliness
Solitude
Persons
If Your Voice Is Heard By More People Because You've Earned Some Kind Of Name And Fame, Your Silence On An Issue Of Urgent Moral Importance Is Even More Of A Betrayal. Privilege Is Obligation.
Betrayal
Names
Voice
When Action Grows Unprofitable, Gather Information; When Information Grows Unprofitable, Sleep.
Funny
Humor
Sleep
If You Evade Suffering, You Also Evade The Chance Of Joy.
Joy
Suffering
Chance
Revolution Is Our Obligation: Our Hope Of Evolution.
Revolution
Evolution
Obligation
He Knew Now, And The Knowledge Was Hard, That His Task Had Never Been To Undo What He Had Done, But To Finish What He Had Begun.
Tasks
Done
Hard
There Are Very Real Differences Between Science Fiction And Realistic Fiction, Between Horror And Fantasy, Between Romance And Mystery. Differences In Writing Them, In Reading Them, In Criticizing Them. Vive Les Différences! They're What Gives Each Genre Its Singular Flavor And Savor, Its Particular Interest For The Reader - And The Writer.
Real
Reading
Writing
While We Read A Novel, We Are Insane—bonkers. We Believe In The Existence Of People Who Aren't There, We Hear Their Voices... Sanity Returns (in Most Cases) When The Book Is Closed.
Believe
Book
Voice
The Word Must Be Heard In Silence; There Must Be Darkness To See The Stars.
Stars
Silence
Darkness
Dreams Take Short Cuts.
Dream
Cutting
Short Cuts
Every Book Purchase Made From Amazon Is A Vote For A Culture Without Content And Without Contentment.
Book
Contentment
Amazon
A Writer Either Speaks To Adults And Bores Kids, Or Speaks To Kids And Upsets Adults.
Writing
Kids
Upset
And Though I Came To Forget Or Regret All I Have Ever Done, Yet Would I Remember That Once I Saw The Dragons Aloft On The Wind At Sunset Above The Western Isles; And I Would Be Content.
Regret
Sunset
Dragons
Alone, No One Wins Freedom.
Freedom
Winning
Groups
Happiness Is Based On A Just Discrimination Of What Is Necessary, What Is Neither Necessary Nor Destructive, And What Is Destructive. In The Middle Category, However - That Of The Unnecessary But Undestructive, That Of Comfort, Luxury, Exuberance, Etc
Happiness
Luxury
Justice
No Man, No Power, Can Bind The Action Of Wizardry Or Still The Words Of Power. For They Are The Very Words Of Making, And One Who Could Silence Them Could Unmake The World.
Inspirational
Life
Men
We Of Es Toch Tell A Little Myth, Which Says That In The Beginning The Creator Told A Great Lie. For There Was Nothing At All, But The Creator Spoke, Saying, It Exists. And Behold, In Order That The Lie Of God Might Be God's Truth, The Universe At Once Began To Exist.
Lying
Order
Littles
As You See, I Bear Some Resentment And Some Scars From The Years Of Anti-genre Bigotry. My Own Fiction, Which Moves Freely Around Among Realism, Magical Realism, Science Fiction, Fantasy Of Various Kinds, Historical Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, Parable, And Other Subgenres, To The Point Where Much Of It Is Ungenrifiable, All Got Shoved Into The Sci Fi Wastebasket Or Labeled As Kiddilit - Subliterature.
Moving
Years
Historical
I Am No More Lonely Than The Loon On The Pond That Laughs So Loud.
Lonely
Laughing
Ponds
Greed Puts Out The Sun.
Greed
Sun
Safety Lies In Catering To The In-group. We Are Not All Brave. All I Would Ask Of Writers Who Find It Hard To Question The Universal Validity Of Their Personal Opinions And Affiliations Is That They Consider This: Every Group We Belong To - By Gender, Sex, Race, Religion, Age - Is An In-group, Surrounded By An Immense Out-group, Living Next Door And All Over The World, Who Will Be Alive As Far Into The Future As Humanity Has A Future. That Out-group Is Called Other People. It Is For Them That We Write.
Sex
Lying
Writing
The Counsel Of The Dead Is Not Profitable To The Living.
Profitable
The Search For Pleasure Is Circular, Repetitive, Atemporal. The Variety Seeking Of The Spectator, The Thrill Hunter, The Sexually Promiscuous, Always Ends In The Same Place. It Has An End. It Comes To The End And Has To Start Over. It Is Not A Journey And Return, But A Closed Cycle, A Locked Room, A Cell.
Journey
Cells
Starting Over
I'm Not A Quester Or A Searcher For The Truth. I Don't Really Think There Is One Answer, So I Never Went Looking For It. My Impulse Is Less Questing And More Playful. I Like Trying On Ideas And Ways Of Life And Religious Approaches. I'm Just Not A Good Candidate For Conversion.
Religious
Thinking
Ideas
Ignorant Power Is A Bane!
Ignorant
Bane
In Reading A Novel, Any Novel, We Have To Know Perfectly Well That The Whole Thing Is Nonsense, And Then, While Reading, Believe Every Word Of It. Finally, When We're Done With It, We May Find - If It's A Good Novel - That We're A Bit Different From What We Were Before We Read It, That We Have Changed A Little... But It's Very Hard To Say Just What We Learned, How We Were Changed.
Believe
Reading
Different
He Is Far Too Intelligent To Become Really Cerebral.
Intelligent
Cerebral
A Man Wants His Virility Regarded. A Woman Wants Her Femininity Appreciated, However Indirect And Subtle The Indications Of Regard And Appreciation. [here] One Is Respected And Judged Only As A Human Being. It Is An Appalling Experience.
Appreciation
Men
Want
Who Knows A Man's Name, Holds That Man's Life In His Keeping. Thus To Ged, Who Had Lost Faith In Himself, Vetch Had Given Him That Gift That Only A Friend Can Give, The Proof Of Unshaken, Unshakeable Trust.
Men
Names
Giving
Prose Writers Are Interested Mostly In Life And Commas.
Prose
The Hunger Of A Dragon Is Slow To Wake, But Hard To Sate.
Dragons
Hunger
Hard
But You Must Not Change One Thing, One Pebble, One Grain Of Sand, Until You Know What Good And Evil Will Follow On That Act. The World Is In Balance, In Equilibrium. A Wizard's Power Of Changing And Summoning Can Shake The Balance Of The World. It Is Dangerous, That Power...it Must Follow Knowledge, And Serve Need.
Evil
Balance
Needs
My World, My Earth Is A Ruin. A Planet Spoiled By The Human Species. We Multiplied And Fought And Gobbled Until There Was Nothing Left, And Then We Died. We Controlled Neither Appetite Nor Violence; We Did Not Adapt. We Destroyed Ourselves. But We Destroyed The World First.
Earth Day
World
Ruins
Growing Up During World War Ii Certainly Affected My Whole View Of Life, But I Hardly Know How, It Goes So Deep. What's Hard To Explain Now Is That, Though We Were Never Invaded, And Bombed Only Once And Ineffectively On The Coast Of Oregon, Everybody In The Country Was In That War. Everything We Did Was Influenced By It - Eating, Traveling, Dressing, Thinking - Everything In Daily Life.
Country
Growing Up
War
She Had Always Known That All Lives Are In Common, Rejoicing In Her Kinship To The Fish In The Tanks Of Her Laboratories, Seeking The Experience Of Existences Outside The Human Boundary.
Animal
Tanks
Common
If One Believes That Words Are Acts, As I Do, Then One Must Hold Writers Responsible For What Their Words Do.
Believe
Responsible
Ifs
What's Wrong With Men?" Tenar Inquired Cautiously. As Cautiously, Lowering Her Voice, Moss Replied, "i Don't Know, My Dearie. I've Thought On It. Often I've Thought On It. The Best I Can Say It Is Like This. A Man's In His Skin, See, Like A Nut In Its Shell." She Held Up Her Long, Bent, Wet Fingers As If Holding A Walnut. "it's Hard And Strong, That Shell, And It's All Full Of Him. Full Of Grand Man-meat, Man-self. And That's All. That's All There Is. It's All Him And Nothing Else, Inside.
Strong
Men
Self
It Is Useless Work That Darkens The Heart.
Work
Heart
Useless
It Always Seemed To Me They're Sort Of Alike ... Magic And Music. Spells And Tunes. For One Thing, You Have To Get Them Just Exactly Right.
Magic
Tunes
Spells
Genre Fiction Was Looked At As A Ghetto, But I Wonder Now If Realist Fiction, Sealing Itself Off In The Glum Suburbs Of A Dysfunctional Society, Denying The Use Of Imagination, Was The Ghetto.
Ghetto
Imagination
Fiction
The Label Ya Actually Means Nothing Except That The Protagonists, Or Some Of Them, Are Young. Publishers Like It Because It Is A Secure Marketing Niche. But The Cost Of Security Is Exclusion From Literary Consideration.
Mean
Marketing
Exclusion
If You Deny Any Affinity With Another Person Or Kind Of Person, If You Declare It To Be Wholly Different From Yourself
Equality
Different
Kind
Manhood Is Patience. Mastery Is Nine Time Patience
Mastery
Nine
Time Patience
It Is Very Hard For Evil To Take Hold Of The Unconsenting Soul.
Evil
Soul
Ged
Love Doesn't Just Sit There, Like A Stone; It Has To Be Made, Like Bread, Remade All The Time, Made New.
Love
Life
Relationship
All Knowledge Is Local, All Truth Is Partial. No Truth Can Make Another Truth Untrue. All Knowledge Is Part Of The Whole Knowledge. Once You Have Seen The Larger Pattern, You Cannot Go Back To Seeing The Part As The Whole.
Patterns
Truth Is
Whole
The Historic Function Of A Senator From Oregon Is To Drive All The Other Senators Mad.
Oregon
Mad
Historic
If You Evade Suffering You Also Evade The Chance Of Joy. Pleasure You May Get, Or Pleasures, But You Will Not Be Fulfilled. You Will Not Know What It Is To Come Home.
Home
Joy
Suffering
The Pornography Of Violence Of Course Far Exceeds, In Volume And General Acceptance, Sexual Pornography, In This Puritan Land Of Ours.
Acceptance
Land
Violence
Suffering Is Dysfunctional, Except As A Bodily Warning Against Danger. Psychologically And Socially It's Merely Destructive.
Suffering
Warning
Danger
I Use A Whole Lot Of Half-assed Semicolons; There Was One Of Them Just Now; That Was A Semicolon After 'semicolons,' And Another One After 'now.
Use
Half
Whole
All Knowledge Is Partial, Infinitesimally Partial. Reason Is A Net Thrown Out Into An Ocean. What Truth It Brings In Is A Fragment, A Glimpse, A Scintillation Of The Whole Truth.
Ocean
Humility
Glimpse
The Light Is The Left Hand Of Darkness.
Light
Hands
Darkness
I Know That Nobody Who Hasn't Been In Battle Or Under Attack Can Know What War Is. But Even In Terms Of Being Safe At Home, It's Also True That Many Americans Who Think They Know What Being At War Is, Don't. Including, Of Course, George W. Bush And His People. They Don't Have A Clue.
War
Home
Thinking
Sometimes One's Very Angry And Preaches, But I Know That To Clinch A Point Is To Close It. To Leave The Reader Free To Decide What Your Work Means, That's The Real Art; It Makes The Work Inexhaustible.
Art
Real
Mean
No Darkness Lasts Forever. And Even There, There Are Stars.
Stars
Forever
Darkness
There Is Neither Source Nor End, For All Things Are In The Center Of Time. As All The Stars May Be Reflected In A Round Raindrop Falling In The Night: So Too Do All The Stars Reflect The Raindrop. There Is Neither Darkness Nor Death, For All Things Are, In The Light Of The Moment, And Their End And Their Beginning Are One.
Stars
Fall
Night
To Oppose Something Is To Maintain It... You Must Go Somewhere Else; You Must Have Another Goal; Then You Walk A Different Road.
Somewhere Else
Goal
Different
True Myths May Serve For Thousands Of Years As An Inexhaustible Source Of Intellectual Speculation, Religious Joy, Ethical Inquiry, And Artistic Renewal. The Real Mystery Is Not Destroyed By Reason. The Fake One Is. You Look At It And It Vanishes. You Look At The Blonde Hero-really Look-and He Turns Into A Gerbil. But You Look At Apollo, And He Looks Back At You. The Poet Rilke Looked At A Statue Of Apollo About Fifty Years Ago, And Apollo Spoke To Him. "you Must Change Your Life," He Said. When The True Myth Rises Into Consciousness, That Is Always Its Message. You Must Change Your Life.
Life
Religious
Real
Grieving, Like Being Blind, Is A Strange Business; You Have To Learn How To Do It. We Seek Company In Mourning, But After The Early Bursts Of Tears, After The Praises Have Been Spoken, And The Good Days Remembered, And The Lament Cried, And The Grave Closed, There Is No Company In Grief. It Is A Burden Borne Alone.
Grief
Good Day
Grieving
We Scarcely Know How Much Of Our Pleasure And Interest In Life Comes To Us Through Our Eyes Until We Have To Do Without Them; And Part Of That Pleasure Is That The Eyes Can Choose Where To Look. But The Ears Can't Choose Where To Listen.
Eye
Looks
Ears
What Is Love Of One's Country; Is It Hate Of One's Uncountry? Then It's Not A Good Thing. Is It Simply Self-love? That's A Good Thing, But One Musn't Make A Virtue Of It, Or A Profession...insofar As I Love Life, I Love [my Country], But That Sort Of Love Does Not Have A Boundary-line Of Hate. And Beyond That, I Am Ignorant, I Hope.
Country
Hate
Love Life
Living, Being In The World, Was A Much Greater And Stranger Thing Than She Had Ever Dreamed.
World
Stranger
Greater
But It Doesn't Take A Thousand Men To Open A Door, My Lord." "it Might To Keep It Open.
Men
Doors
Might
When We're Done With It, We May Find—if It's A Good Novel—that We're A Bit Different From What We Were Before We Read It, That We Have Been Changed A Little, As If By Having Meet A New Face, Crossed A Street We've Never Crossed Before.
Different
Done
May
The Trouble Is That We Have A Bad Habit, Encouraged By Pedants And Sophisticates, Of Considering Happiness As Something Rather Stupid. Only Pain Is Intellectual, Only Evil Interesting. This Is The Treason Of The Artist: A Refusal To Admit The Banality Of Evil And The Terrible Boredom Of Pain.
Happiness
Pain
Stupid
If You Deny Any Affinity With Another Person Or Kind Of Person, If You Declare It To Be Wholly Different From Yourself - As Men Have Done To Women, And Class Has Done To Class, And Nation Has Done To Nation - You May Hate It Or Deify It; But In Either Case You Have Denied Its Spiritual Equality And Its Human Reality. You Have Made It Into A Thing, To Which The Only Possible Relationship Is A Power Relationship. And Thus You Have Fatally Impoverished Your Own Reality.
Spiritual
Respect
Hate
We Have Inhabited Both The Actual And The Imaginary Realms For A Long Time. But We Don't Live In Either Place The Way Our Parents Or Ancestors Did. Enchantment Alters With Age, And With The Age. We Know A Dozen Arthurs Now, All Of Them True. The Shire Changed Irrevocably Even In Bilbo's Lifetime. Don Quixote Went Riding Out To Argentina And Met Jorge Luis Borges There. Plus C'est La Même Chose, Plus ça Change.
Long
Parent
Age
Maybe When You Meet The People You Are Supposed To Meet You Know It, Without Knowing It.
Knowing
People
Knows
A Profound Love Between Two People Involves, After All, The Power And Chance Of Doing Profound Hurt.
Life
Hurt
Two
The Law Of Evolution Is That The Strongest Survives!' 'yes, And The Strongest, In The Existence Of Any Social Species, Are Those Who Are Most Social. In Human Terms, Most Ethical...there Is No Strength To Be Gained From Hurting One Another. Only Weakness.
Peace
Hurt
Law
But It Is One Thing To Read About Dragons And Another To Meet Them.
Dragons
One Thing
It Was Men's Ambitions, They Said, That Had Perverted All The Arts To Ends Of Gain.
Art
Ambition
Men
The Individual Cannot Bargain With The State. The State Recognizes No Coinage But Power: And It Issues The Coins Itself.
Issues
Coins
Individual
There Have Been Great Societies That Did Not Use The Wheel, But There Have Been No Societies That Did Not Tell Stories.
Writing
Library
Stories
Reason Is A Faculty Far Larger Than Mere Objective Force. When Either The Political Or The Scientific Discourse Announces Itself As The Voice Of Reason, It Is Playing God, And Should Be Spanked And Stood In The Corner.
God
Voice
Political
Belief Is The Wound That Knowledge Heals.
Belief
Thrive
Heal
When The Genuine Myth Rises Into Consciousness, That Is Always Its Message. You Must Change Your Life.
Messages
Consciousness
Changing Your Life
Love Does Not Obey The Mind, And Turns To Hate When Forced.
Hate
Mind
Doe
It Is A Real Wilderness, And Those Who Go There Should Not Feel Too Safe.
Real
Safe
Wilderness
I Suppose The Most Important Thing, The Heaviest Single Factor In One's Life, Is Whether One's Born Male Or Female. In Most Societies It Determines One's Expectations, Activities, Outlook, Ethics, Manners - Almost Everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic Usages. Clothing. Even Food. Women... Women Tend To Eat Less... It's Extremely Hard To Separate The Innate Differences From The Learned Ones. Even Where Women Participate Equally With Men In The Society, They Still After All Do All The Childbearing, And So Most Of The Child-rearing.
Children
Men
Vocabulary
There Is Not Much You Can Say About A Baby Unless You Are Talking With Its Father Or Another Mother Or Nurse; Infants Are Not Part Of The Realm Of Ordinary Language, Talk Is Inadequate To Them As They Are Inadequate To Talk.
Mother
Baby
Father
Honestly, Orthodoxy Concerns Me About As Much As It Concerns Your Average Jackrabbit. I Only Follow Rules That Take Me Where I Want To Go. If There Aren't Any Rules, I Make Up My Own And Follow Them Strictly.
Average
Want
Orthodoxy
Sanity Returns (in Most Cases) When The Book Is Closed.
Book
Return
Sanity
What Is A Woman's Power Then?" She Asked. "i Don't Think We Know." "when Has A Woman Power Because She's A Woman? With Her Children, I Suppose. For A While..." "in Her House, Maybe." She Looked Around The Kitchen. "but The Doors Are Shut," She Said, "the Doors Are Locked." "because You're Valuable." "oh Yes. We're Precious. So Long As We're Powerless.
Children
Thinking
Doors
The Wise Needn't Ask, The Fool Asks In Vain.
Wise
Fool
Vain
To Hear, One Must Be Silent.
Silent
We Sleep Researchers Like Cats, You Know; They Sleep A Lot!
Sleep
Cat
Researchers
They Can Send Death At Once, But Life Is Slower.
Life Is
We Have Been Civilized For A Thousand Millennia. We Have Histories Of Hundreds Of Those Millennia. We Have Tried Everything. Anarchism, In All Its Forms, With The Rest. But I Have Not Tried It. They Say There Is Nothing New Under Any Sun. But If Each Life Is Not New, Each Single Life, Then Why Are We Born?
Single Life
Sun
Life Is
What Is Love Of One's Country; Is It Hate Of One's Uncountry? Then It's Not A Good Thing.
Country
Hate
What Is Love
In That Moment Ged Understood The Singing Of The Bird, And The Language Of The Water Falling In The Basin Of The Fountain, And The Shape Of The Clouds, And The Beginning And End Of The Wind That Stirred The Leaves; It Seemed To Him That He Himself Was A Word Spoken By The Sunlight.
Fall
Clouds
Wind
Progress Means Nothing To Presence.
Mean
Progress
And I Needed A Rock. Something To Hold Onto, To Stand On. Something Solid. Because Everything Was Going Soft, Turning Into Mush, Into Marsh, Into Fog. Fog Closing In On All Sides. I Didn't Know Where I Was At All.
Rocks
Fog
Sides
Go To Bed; Tired Is Stupid.
Stupid
Tired
Bed
Jungians Such As Joseph Campbell Have Generalised Such Journeys Into A Set Of Archetypal Events And Images. Though They Can Be Useful In Criticism, I Mistrust Them As Fatally Reductive. “ah, The Night Sea Voyage!” We Cry, Feeling That We Have Understood Something Important — But We’ve Merely Recognised It. Until We Are Actually On That Voyage, We Have Understood Nothing.
Night
Journey
Sea
Scientific Truth Will Out, You Can't Hide The Sun Under A Stone.
Science
Stones
Sun
Genre Is A Useful Concept Only When Used Not Evaluatively But Descriptively.
Genre Is
Used
Genre
The One Thing A Writer Has To Have Is A Pencil And Some Paper. That's Enough, So Long As She Knows That She And She Alone Is In Charge Of That Pencil, And Responsible, She And She Alone, For What It Writes On That Paper.
Writing
Long
Paper
Hate Gets Going, It Goes Round, It Gets Older And Tighter And Older And Tighter, Until It Holds A Person Inside It Like A Fist Holds A Stick.
Hate
Hatred
Sticks
Success Is Somebody Else's Failure.
Well, We Think That Time "passes," Flows Past Us, But What If It Is We Who Move Forward, From Past To Future, Always Discovering The New? It Would Be A Little Like Reading A Book, You See. The Book Is All There, All At Once, Between Its Covers. But If You Want To Read The Story And Understand It, You Must Begin With The First Page, And Go Forward, Always In Order. So The Universe Would Be A Very Great Book, And We Would Be Very Small Readers.
Time
Moving
Book
And I Speak Of Spiritual Suffering! Of People Seeing Their Talent, Their Work, Their Lives Wasted. Of Good Minds Submitting To Stupid Ones. Of Strength And Courage Strangled By Envy, Greed For Power, Fear Of Change. Change Is Freedom, Change Is Life
Spiritual
Stupid
People
Animals Do Neither Good Nor Evil. They Do As They Must Do.we May Call What They Do Harmful Or Useful, But Good And Evil Belong To Us, Who Chose To Choose What We Do. [. . .] The Animals Need Only Be And Do.we're Yoked, And They're Free. So To Be With An Animal Is To Know A Little Freedom.
Animal
Evil
Needs
The Literature Of The Emperor Penguin Is As Forbidding, As Inaccessible, As The Frozen Heart Of Antarctica Itself. Its Beauties May Be Unearthly, But They Are Not For Us.
Heart
Animal
Frozen
Infinite Are The Arguments Of Mages.
Argument
Infinite
Music Is Another Way Of Thinking, Or Maybe Thinking Is Another Kind Of Music.
Music
Thinking
Way
We're Each Of Us Alone, To Be Sure. What Can You Do But Hold Your Hand Out In The Dark?
Dark
Hands
Those Who Build Walls Are Their Own Prisoners.
Wall
Prisoner
Disapproval
Where There's Property, There's Theft.
Stealing
Theft
Property
Truth, As Ever, Avoids The Stranger.
Stranger
When In The Land Of Property Think Like A Propertarian. Dress Like One, Eat Like One, Act Like One, Be One.
Thinking
Land
Dresses
Manipulated, One Manipulates Others.
Manipulate
Anyhow They’re Always Exceptions. But Most Women, Their Only Relationship To A Man Is Having. Either Owning Or Being Owned.
Men
Exception
If You Want To Know All About The Sea ... And Ask The Sea Itself, What Does It Say? Grumble Grumble Swish Swish. It Is Too Busy Being Itself To Know Anything About Itself.
Sea
Doe
Want
To See A Candle's Light, One Must Take It Into A Dark Place. This Is The Same As To See The Good And Be Grateful, One Must Compare And Contrast It With Something Worse - Not Better!
Gratitude
Grateful
Dark
Virginity Is Now A Mere Preamble Or Waiting Room To Be Got Out Of As Soon As Possible; It Is Without Significance. Old Age Is Similarly A Waiting Room, Where You Go After Life's Over And Wait For Cancer Or A Stroke. The Years Before And After The Menstrual Years Are Vestigial: The Only Meaningful Condition Left To Women Is That Of Fruitfulness.
Meaningful
Cancer
Waiting Rooms
Only In Silence The Word, Only In Dark The Light, Only In Dying Life: Bright The Hawk's Flight On The Empty Sky.
Dark
Light
Sky
My Imagination Makes Me Human And Makes Me A Fool; It Gives Me All The World, And Exiles Me From It.
Inspirational
Stupid
Equality
Have You Never Thought How Danger Must Surround Power As Shadow Does Light?
Light
Shadow
Doe
Is It The Gods Who Set This Fire In Our Hearts, Or Do We Each Make Our Fierce Desire Into A God?
Heart
Fire
Desire
I Was In Too Much Haste, And Now Have No Time Left. I Traded All The Sunlight And The Cities And The Distant Lands For A Handful Of Power, For A Shadow, For The Dark.
Dark
Land
Cities
Oh, Never And Forever Aren't For Mortals, Love. But We Won't Be Parted Till I Know It's Right That We Part.
Saying Goodbye
Forever
Knows
As A Man's Real Power Grows And His Knowledge Widens, Ever The Way He Can Follow Grows Narrower: Until At Last He Chooses Nothing,but Does Only And Wholly What He Must Do.
Real
Men
Doe
All Times Are Changing Times, But Ours Is One Of Massive, Rapid Moral And Mental Transformation. Archetypes Turn Into Millstones, Large Simplicities Get Complicated, Chaos Becomes Elegant, And What Everybody Knows Is True Turns Out To Be What Some People Used To Think.
Thinking
Times Are Changing
People
One Voice Speaking Truth Is A Greater Force Than Fleets And Armies.
Time
Army
Voice
There Are Times When You Have To Speak Because Silence Is Betrayal.
Betrayal
Silence
Speak
It's The Self That Suffers, And There's A Place Where The Self--ceases. I Don't Know How To Say It. But I Believe That The Reality--the Truth That I Recognize In Suffering As I Don't In Comfort And Happiness--that The Reality Of Pain Is Not Pain. If You Can Get Through It. If You Can Endure It All The Way.
Pain
Believe
Reality
Legends Of Prediction Are Common Throughout The Whole Household Of Man. Gods Speak, Spirits Speak, Computers Speak. Oracular Ambiguity Or Statistical Probability Provides Loopholes, And Discrepancies Are Expunged By Faith.
Faith
Men
Legends
One Man May As Easily Destroy, As Govern: Be King Or Anti-king.
Kings
Men
May
You Cannot Blame Everything On The Enemy.
Responsibility
Enemy
Blame
I Know People, I Know Towns, Farms, Hills And Rivers And Rocks, I Know How The Sun At Sunset In Autumn Falls On The Side Of A Certain Plowland In The Hills; But What Is The Sense Of Giving A Boundary To All That, Of Giving A Name And Ceasing To Love Where The Name Ceases To Apply?
Fall
Sunset
Autumn
What The Brain Does By Itself Is Infinitely More Fascinating And Complex Than Any Response It Can Make To Chemical Stimulation.
Brain
Doe
Chemicals
What Is The Use Trying To Describe The Flowing Of A River At Any One Moment, And Then At The Next Moment, And Then At The Next, And The Next, And The Next? You Wear Out. You Say: There Is A Great River, And It Flows Through This Land, And We Have Named It History.
Land
Rivers
Trying
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