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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.
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
Like
Half
World
Language
Speak
Night
Daylight
Live
Speaks
Always
Fantasy
Think
Poetry
Thinking
Dark
More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.
Ursula K. Le Guin
That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.
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
I know that nobody who hasn't been in battle or under attack can know what war is. But even in terms of being safe at home, it's also true that many Americans who think they know what being at war is, don't. Including, of course, George W. Bush and his people. They don't have a clue.
Ursula K. Le Guin
George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I do not care what comes after I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else
Ursula K. Le Guin
As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.
Ursula K. Le Guin
We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
Sleeping people are so remote.... Right here, but out of communication. That's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy. The sleeper turns his back on everyone.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
Ursula K. Le Guin
It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.
Ursula K. Le Guin
But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.
Ursula K. Le Guin
It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
Ursula K. Le Guin
At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.
Ursula K. Le Guin