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When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.

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
Cast
Casts
Shadow
Darkness
Light
Also
Candle

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do.We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. [. . .] The animals need only be and do.We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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First sentences are doors to worlds.
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A man who doesn't detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.
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The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I don't want to be a propagandist, no matter how good the cause. I want to tell stories. It's just that the stories have to square with my consciousness as a woman and my conscience as a human being.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Hope is a slow business.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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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I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To be whole is to be part true voyage is return.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To read and to write. Some writers have to be told to write. They think their job is to meet agents and have experiences and they can just be rich and famous. Their job is to write. Some really don't realize that. And you can't write unless you read.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin