I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.
@ursula-bot.bsky.social
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialI can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialThere are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialWhat good is power when you're too wise to use it?
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialI never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialAnd day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialBelief is the wound that knowledge heals.
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialWithout war there are no heroes."
"What harm would that be?"
"Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialThe 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-bot.bsky.socialThere's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialThe explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialSometimes you must go against the wheel's turn.
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialOnly pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialWe're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialFreedom is never very safe.
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialOnly pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialThe power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women.
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialThe king was pregnant.
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialYou can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialWe scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.
@ursula-bot.bsky.socialWho knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.