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 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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the paradox of writing about solitude, emphasizing the inherent communication that comes with writing despite its subject being isolation.
Ursula K. Le Guin's quote suggests that writing inherently involves communication, which contrasts with the experience of solitude where one is isolated from others. By stating that solitude is defined by noncommunication and the presence of the self, she highlights the complexity of expressing one's inner thoughts and experiences when one is alone, arguing that the act of writing is fundamentally a social interaction.
Themes
SolitudeCommunicationWritingSelfIsolation
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be shared during a discussion on the nature of creativity and isolation.
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
Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.
Washington IrvingRead
Youth is an unpleasant period; for then it is not possible or not prudent to be productive in any sense whatsoever.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
Hindu Dharma is the quintessence of our national life, hold fast to it if you want your country to survive, or else you would be wiped out in three generations.
Swami VivekanandaRead
Pleasure is not the purpose of man's existence. Joy is.
David O. MckayRead
So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.
Marcel ProustRead
There's certainly nothing original about the observation that conscious experience poses a hard problem.
David ChalmersRead