It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they're not blueprints for action, ever.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Novels can provide moral insights, but they shouldn't dictate our actions.
In this quote, Ursula K. Le Guin expresses her belief that while novels can offer valuable moral lessons and reflections, they are not meant to serve as strict guides for behavior. Instead, they should be seen as prompts for thought and personal interpretation rather than definitive blueprints that determine how one should act in reality.
Themes
NovelsMoral GuidanceLiteratureActionInterpretation
In practice
Example use cases
In a book club discussion about the moral themes in a novel.
More from Ursula K. Le Guin
All quotes →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.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
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.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
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 what we ourselves are and may become.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
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