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A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere.

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
Truth
Pretend
Work
Hide
Anywhere
Scientist
Merely
Behinds
Behind
Artist
Impersonal

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes - the wall, the wall!
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Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.
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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.
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The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.
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To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
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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Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?
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It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.
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What is more arrogant than honesty?
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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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What is love of one's country is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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As a writer, you are free.
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. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction — you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.
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I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it.
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To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only in the truth.
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To see a candle's light, one must take it into a dark place. This is the same as to see the good and be grateful, one must compare and contrast it with something worse - not better!
Ursula K. Le Guin