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My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.

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
Nobody
Reading
Business
Right
Great
Dickens
Aunt

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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True understanding is the spur of genius
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Art and Entertainment are the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work is, the better art it is. To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, is neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Much arrogance is necessary equipment for an artist, I think. Not sufficient, but necessary. It carries one across the gaps.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Where there's property, there's theft.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
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All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
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Sometimes I not only stand there and take it, I even smile at them and say I'm sorry. When I feel that smile coming onto my face, I wish I could take my face off and stamp on it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.
Ursula K. Le Guin