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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.

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
Tell
Stories
Great
Storyteller
Writing
Wheel
Societies
Wheels
Library
Use

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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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 creative adult is the child who has survived.
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Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it's simply meaningless. We don't live in order to die, we live in order to live.
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What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.
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It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.
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Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.
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Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.
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Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
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Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?
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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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If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
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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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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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There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.
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By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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All makers must leave room for acts of the spirit.
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I don't believe that a writer 'gets' (takes into the head) an 'idea' (some sort of mental object) 'from' somewhere, and then turns it into words, and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn't work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow into a story.
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin