No Time To Spare Quotes

“But why do we never question the system itself, so as to find ways to get around it or out of it?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“The sacred and the comic are not that far apart.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“plot introduces connection or causality, therefore shape and form. Plot makes sense of story.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“Ah, the Night Sea Voyage!” 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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“For the seeker, the answer is less important than what the seeker does with the answer.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“The question remains: When all the time you have is spare, is free, what do you make of it?

And what's the difference, really, between that and the time you used to have when you were fifty, or thirty, or fifteen?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“There is a whole lot of power in positive thinking. It is the great placebo effect. In many case, even dire cases, it works.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“Old age is for anybody who gets there.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“What's the use of knowing anything about it ahead of time? You'll find out enough when you get there.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“Does the fear of being unsafe and not in control express itself as anger, or does it use anger as a kind of denial of the fear?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“Belief has no value in itself that I can see. Its value increases as it is useful, diminishes as it is replaced by knowledge, and goes negative when it's noxious. In ordinary life, the need for it diminishes as the quantity and quality of knowledge increase.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“...anger can't be suppressed indefinitely without crippling or corroding the soul.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“But deeper than that lies my aversion to what the sentence says to me: that only the child is alive and creative—so that to grow up is to die. To respect and cherish the freshness of perception and the vast, polymorphous potentialities of childhood is one thing. But to say that we experience true being only in childhood and that creativity is an infantile function—that’s something else. I keep meeting this devaluation of growing up in fiction, and also in the cult of the Inner Child.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“Which is why I have a problem with women in combat in the armed services, and why I watch the rise of women in the “great” universities and the corporations—even the government—with an anxious eye. 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

“As for the charge of escapism, what does escape mean? Escape from real life, responsibility, order, duty, piety, is what the charge implies. But nobody, except the most criminally irresponsible or pitifully incompetent, escapes to jail. The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is “escapism” an accusation of?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“But if children never learn to bear it, they can’t go on to learn that a victory or a defeat in battle, or in any competition other than a purely moral one (whatever that might be), has nothing to do with who is morally better. Might does not make right—right? Therefore right does not make might. Right? But we want it to. “My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.” 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

“(Warning: You can get into something of a tangle with these birds. Many people use the words sparrowhawk and kestrel interchangeably, but kestrels, Eurasian or American, are all falcons, while not all sparrowhawks are kestrels, or vice versa. You see what I mean? I am only sorry we lost the beautiful British name windhover. But we have G. M. Hopkins’s poem.)”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“Same goes for old people who keep their skill at any craft or art they’ve worked at for all those years. Practice does make perfect.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“Belief has its proper and powerful existence in the domains of magic, religion, fear, and hope. I see no opposition between accepting the theory of evolution and believing in God. The intellectual acceptance of a scientific theory and the belief in a transcendent deity have little or no overlap: neither can support or contradict the other. They rise from profoundly different ways of looking at the same world—different ways of coming at reality: the material and the spiritual.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“The idea of female independence and interdependence is met with scoffing hatred by both men and women who see themselves as benefiting from male dominance. Misogyny is by no means limited to men. Living in “a man’s world,” plenty of women distrust and fear themselves as much or more than men do.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“Some scientists hate religion, fear it, and rail against it. And some priests and preachers...claim the absolute primacy of biblical revelation over material fact.
Thus they both set a fatal trap for the believer: if you believe in God you can't believe in evolution, and vice versa.
But this is rather like saying if you believe in Tuesday you can't believe in artichokes.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“A meaningless question has only meaningless answers.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“Even among writers, not all seem to share my enjoyment of pursuing a word or a usage through the dictionaries and the wastebaskets. If I start doing it aloud in public, some of them look at me with horror or compassion, or try to go quietly away.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“Human societies provide us with various more elaborate devices. One of the most effective is respect. You don’t like the stranger, but your carefully respectful behavior to him elicits the same from him, thus avoiding the sterile expense of time and blood on aggression and defense.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“A Modest Proposal: Vegempathy”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“Meaning in art isn’t the same as meaning in science.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“What is the Meaning of this book, this event in the book, this story . . . ? Tell me what it Means. But that’s not my job, honey. That’s your job.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“This has been going on for two or three millennia. That is an amazingly long time for anything to mean anything to anybody.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“KEEP READING books and seeing movies where nobody can fucking say anything except fuck, unless they say shit.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters