Quote

A man wants his virility regarded. A woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. [Here] one is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.

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
Humans
Subtle
Appalling
Men
Appreciation
Indirect
Regard
Femininity
However
Indication
Wants
Respected
Woman
Regarded
Experience
Appreciated
Virility
Human
Judged
Indications

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
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The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.
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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To make a thief, make an owner to create crime, create laws.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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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Besides, when you say you're a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it's kind of irresistible.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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