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Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so do nothing because it seems good to do so do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.

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
Seems
Nothing
Must
Way
Good
Praiseworthy
Righteous
Noble
Cannot

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Sleeping people are so remote.... Right here, but out of communication. That's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy. The sleeper turns his back on everyone.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Sure, it's simple, writing for kids... Just as simple as bringing them up.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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there are times when you have to speak because silence is betrayal.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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What is love of one's country is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one musn't make a virtue of it, or a profession...Insofar as I love life, I love [my country], but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Success is somebody else's failure.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Statesmen remember things selectively.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
Ursula K. Le Guin