Quote

The 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 K. Le Guin

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Ursula K. Le Guin
Age: 88 †
Born: 1929
Born: October 21
Died: 2018
Died: January 22
Author
Feminist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Berkeley
California
Ursula Kroeber
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Makes
Marks
Stories
Wood
Littles
Woods
Live
Mark
Little
Reader
Book
Reading
Writing
Story
Unread
Thing
Black
Pulp

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The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us.
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...If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.
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Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.
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Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.
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If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. ...But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.
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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.
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There's seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.
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Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.
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I do not care what comes after I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
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Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.
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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
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You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
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Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
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There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation.
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If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin--the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin's thinking.
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When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.
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The machine conceals the machinations.
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The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
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Sometimes you must go against the wheel's turn.
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The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical...There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.
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