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If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.
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
Responsible
Hold
Words
Must
Believe
Believes
Acts
Writers
More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling?
Ursula K. Le Guin
All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The more defensive a society, the more conformist.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.
Ursula K. Le Guin
It always seemed to me they're sort of alike ... magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man's fate is not important. If it is not, what is? He could not endure those remembered words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Great artists make the roads good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.
Ursula K. Le Guin
To make a thief, make an owner to create crime, create laws.
Ursula K. Le Guin
We broke the world to make it whole.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Success is somebody else's failure.
Ursula K. Le Guin