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Excess is excrement, ... Excrement retained in the body is a poison.

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
Excrement
Retained
Excess
Poison
Body

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A man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes' witness, if those with him saw nothing.
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Do you know how to read? No. It is one of the black arts. He nodded. But a useful one, he said.
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Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.
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Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced.
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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.
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The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel.
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But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power...It must follow knowledge, and serve need.
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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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Sometimes I not only stand there and take it, I even smile at them and say I'm sorry. When I feel that smile coming onto my face, I wish I could take my face off and stamp on it.
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In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.
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I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark.
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The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness.
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Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed.
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If you want to know all about the sea ... and ask the sea itself, what does it say? Grumble grumble swish swish. It is too busy being itself to know anything about itself.
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself
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Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.
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But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.
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We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
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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