Ursula K. Le Guin

"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul."

"The creative adult is the child who has survived."

"It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope."

"Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books."

"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."

"Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new."

"As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope."

"My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it."

"To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road."

"I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now."

"Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place."