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Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.

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
Good
Books
True
Also
Wells
Book
Unicorns
Well
Unicorn
Children
Perfectly
Real
Aren

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Sometimes one's very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art it makes the work inexhaustible.
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I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced.
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It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
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There is a limited number of plots. There is no limit to the number of stories.
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Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
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It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
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Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
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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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How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn't saved, isn't taught?
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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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She obeys me, but only because she wants to. It's the only justification for obedience, Ged observed.
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge) by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets) and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
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Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art - the art of words.
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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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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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At the pit's bottom is no anger.
Ursula K. Le Guin