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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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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
May
Differently
Book
Fifty
Whole
Told
Something
Though
Reading
Understand
Tell
Seems
Fifteen
More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Yet we were rescued by that fancy, and saved by a myth.
Ursula K. Le Guin
She obeys me, but only because she wants to. It's the only justification for obedience, Ged observed.
Ursula K. Le Guin
We sleep researchers like cats, you know they sleep a lot!
Ursula K. Le Guin
And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
There's no way to use power for good.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine time patience
Ursula K. Le Guin
If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.
Ursula K. Le Guin
First sentences are doors to worlds.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.
Ursula K. Le Guin