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
Always
Wisdom
Pattern
Life
Lives
Patterns
World
Jobs
Planets
Beautiful
Tired
Seems
Rocks
Whole
Close
Hard
Lose
Thing
Loses
Dirt

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.
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It is not human to be without shame and without desire.
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I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.
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I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.
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All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
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The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.
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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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What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.
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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
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She'll die.' 'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive.
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There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.
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All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.
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Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.
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Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
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Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.
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She obeys me, but only because she wants to. It's the only justification for obedience, Ged observed.
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There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
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George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
Ursula K. Le Guin