Quotation Time with Ursula Le Guin: Part II

So, in case it's not apparent at this point, I really like Ursula Le Guin. And she's intelligent. And verbose. And a badass.

Also, the library apparently has a copy of another book on writing by her which I have not read so... there may be another set of Ursula Le Guin quotes popping up later. Fair warning.

Anyway, more quotes (again from The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination):

-"Children have a seemingly innate passion for justice; they don't have to be taught it. They have to have it beaten out of them, in fact, to end up as properly prejudiced adults."
-"Women have a particular stake in keeping the oral functions of literature alive, since misogyny wants women to be silent, and misogynist critics and academics do not want to hear the woman's voice in literature, in any sense of the word."
-"It is curious that evidence for what looks like an aesthetic sense--a desire for objects because they are perceived as desirable in themselves, a willingness to expend real energy acquiring something that has no practical end at all--seems to turn up only among us [humans], some lowly little rodents, and some rowdy birds."
-"In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order. Poetry and plays have no relation to practical problems."
-"To me the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment [in stories] but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader's mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live."
-"These days, no writer can legitimately claim either ignorance or innocence as a defense of prejudice or bigotry in their writing."
-"A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book."
-"All human beings are liars; that is true; you must believe me."