"Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
~ Ursula K. Le Guin ~












More Ursula K. Le Guin quotes
"There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, ...
"Why is it that if you say you don’t enjoy using an e-reader, or that you aren’t going to get one till the technology is mature, you get reported as “l...
"We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of wha...
"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. Fin...
"The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often ve...
"The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
"The constrained body knows and values the freedom of the mind.
"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.
"To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
"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. En...
"The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.
"The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not p...
"A book won't move your eyes for you like TV or a movie does. A book won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put yo...