Quote

In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.

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
Religion
Helplessness
Force
Ceremony
Understand
Dependence
Fear
Admit
Great
Acts
Forces
Allow
Craved
Loss
Ceremonies

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He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater detterent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand.
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Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced.
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Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.
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The word must be heard in silence there must be darkness to see the stars.
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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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You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
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A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.
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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.
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Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.
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One must work with time and not against it.
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The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.
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Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.
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A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.
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In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
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Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.
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What is life without incompatible realities?
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But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power...It must follow knowledge, and serve need.
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To read and to write. Some writers have to be told to write. They think their job is to meet agents and have experiences and they can just be rich and famous. Their job is to write. Some really don't realize that. And you can't write unless you read.
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The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.
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What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair...Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.
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