“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

The Operating Instructions in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (2004)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need…" by Ursula K. Le Guin?

Ursula K. Le Guin 292

American writer 1929–2018

Related quotes

“How a person seems to show up for us is intimately connected to how we choose to show up for them.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Source: Return to Love

“I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us — we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2011, Tucson Memorial Address (January 2011)
Context: That's what I believe, in part because that's what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed. Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation's future. She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted. I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us — we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations.

“I wonder what becomes of lost opportunities? Perhaps our guardian angel gathers them up as we drop them, and will give them back to us in the beautiful sometime when we have grown wiser, and learned how to use them rightly.”

Helen Keller book The Story of My Life

Source: The Story of My Life

“It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.”

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

"Human Character as a Vital Lie", p. 56
The Denial of Death (1973)

“Oh but why couldn't Pfizer agree to our terms, some say. Well, we needed Pfizer's vaccine more than they needed us. We could have saved lives if we kept our ego down and said 'how can we make it work Pfizer' rather than 'why can't you listen to us.' Lives could have been saved.”

Chetan Bhagat (1974) Indian author, born 1974

Source: — Chetan Bhagat (@chetan_bhagat) 2021 at Twitter https://twitter.com/chetan_bhagat/status/1387331772761915392

“It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?”

John Steinbeck book The Grapes of Wrath

Source: The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

“We create organizations to serve us, but somehow they also force us to serve them. Sometimes it feels as if our institutions have run out of control, like the machinery of Charlie Chaplin's film Modem Times. Why we should become slaves to our servants… A society of organizations is one in which organizations enter our lives as influential forces in a great many ways — in how we work, what we eat, how we get educated and cured of our illnesses, how we get entertained, and how our ideas are shaped. The ways in which we try to control our organization and our organization in return try to control us become major issues in the lives of all of us.”

Henry Mintzberg (1939) Canadian busines theorist

Henry Mintzberg (1989) Mintzberg on management: inside our strange world of organizations. p. 301. As cited in: R. van den Nieuwenhof (2003) 2 strategie: omgaan met de omgeving. p. 36

“We must at least allow the pain inflicted upon us by our enemies to be a megaphone to our own deafness to the world, waking us up to the needs of others, to the violence inflicted upon them.”

Joshua Casteel (1979–2012) US Army soldier, lecturer, and writer

Source: Letters from Abu Ghraib (2008), p. 92.

“As we have already learned how to sacrifice our own lives, now no one can stop us!”

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1920–1975) Bengali revolutionary, founder ("father") of Bangladesh

Quote, This time the struggle is for our freedom (1971)

“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Ursula K. Le Guin 292

Related quotes

Related topics