It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Reading a good novel can transform our perspectives and emotions.
Ursula K. Le Guin's quote highlights the transformative power of literature. Engaging with a well-written novel not only offers new experiences but also subtly alters our understanding of ourselves and the world. The act of reading is likened to a profound encounter that broadens our horizons, suggesting that literature serves as a catalyst for personal growth and change.
Themes
ReadingTransformationLiteratureChangeExperience
In practice
Example use cases
Mention this quote during a book club discussion to emphasize the impact of literature on personal development.
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
Similar quotes
The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.
Nathaniel HawthorneRead
I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.
Edith WhartonRead
A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.
Charles BaxterRead
Writers of feminist dystopian fiction are alert to the realities that grind down women's lives, that make the unthinkable suddenly thinkable.
Naomi AldermanRead
In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.
Jacques DerridaRead
I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.
Jose SaramagoRead