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What good is power when you're too wise to use it?

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
Wise
Use
Power
Good

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A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be it tells itself I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words and the writer's job is to be its medium.
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It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, My God what have I done?
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Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
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Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it.
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There are dance artists, painting artists and writing artists. Authors are writing artists. You can practice art in whatever medium you choose, and words are mine.
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We read books to find out who we are.
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Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.
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There are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
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By and large books are mankind's best invention.
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The machine conceals the machinations.
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There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.
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My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
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Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.
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If you want to know all about the sea ... and ask the sea itself, what does it say? Grumble grumble swish swish. It is too busy being itself to know anything about itself.
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Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
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Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed.
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A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.
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See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
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The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.
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I gather that a lot of the pots in the great museum in Baghdad, which we allowed to be looted and then gutted, are now for sale to the highest bidder on the art and archeology black market. This is good capitalism, I guess, while a museum, being a public trust and accessible to all, is anticapitalist, pretty damn near socialist in fact.
Ursula K. Le Guin