Quote

At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.

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
Point
Realities
Means
Realism
Reality
Adequate
Mean
Incredible
Perhaps
Least
Existence
Understanding
Portraying

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.
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A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.
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The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
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The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
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We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.
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You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.
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The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us.
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If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.
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Not even need and love can defeat fate.
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there are times when you have to speak because silence is betrayal.
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Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its weakness. But fantasy seems to be eternal and omnipresent and always attractive to kids.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.
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I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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 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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What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
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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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And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.
Ursula K. Le Guin