We don’t live in order to die, we live in order to live. For the rest of us it’s simply meaningless.

Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism.

With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart. And if you want to strike out in any new direction - you go alone. Great artists make the roads good teachers and good companions can point them out. (There is quite an array of jets, buses and hacks which you can ride to Success but that is a different destination.) It is a pretty wild country. I have never found anywhere, in the domain of art, that you don't have to walk to.But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. I talk about the gods, I am an atheist.Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (1976).The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The artist deals in what cannot be said in words.'Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction' (1976).When true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him.

But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. You look at the Blond Hero - really look - and he turns into a gerbil. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal.Reprinted in The Language of the Night, 1979. 'American SF and The Other' in Science-Fiction Studies 7, 1975.And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself-as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation-you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality.Reprinted in The Language of the Night (Ultramarine Publishing, 1979). 'Prophets and Mirrors: Science Fiction as a Way of Seeing' in The Living Light 7:3 (Fall, 1970).To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art it makes the work inexhaustible. I know that to clinch a point is to close it. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people. We need to be taught these skills we need guides to show us how. All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. Quotes When true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. 1.2.5 The Word for World Is Forest (1972).1.1.2 The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975).

The dispossessed by ursula k leguin