Quote

If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.

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
Hard
Lose
Thing
Loses
Dirt
Always
Wisdom
Pattern
Life
Lives
Patterns
World
Jobs
Planets
Beautiful
Tired
Seems
Rocks
Whole
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When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
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My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.
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The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one's true identity in both.
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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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I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark.
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It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.
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He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in.
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There is no kingdom like the forests.
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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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Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.
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We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
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To see a candle's light, one must take it into a dark place. This is the same as to see the good and be grateful, one must compare and contrast it with something worse - not better!
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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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They can send death at once, but life is slower.
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At the pit's bottom is no anger.
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No matter how intelligent a man is, he can't see what he doesn't know how to see.
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Hope is a slow business.
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It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself ... both and one. A shadow on snow.
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Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.
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The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.
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