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To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.

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
Sing
Belief
Learn
Song
Without
Mind
Tune
Tunes

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes.
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... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
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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.
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Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?
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If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
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But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord. It might to keep it open.
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Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.
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To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.
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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.
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It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself ... both and one. A shadow on snow.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
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Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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One must work with time and not against it.
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If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.
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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Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
Ursula K. Le Guin