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The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

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
States
Recognizes
Bargains
Coins
Issues
State
Individual
Cannot
Coinage
Power
Bargain

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When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
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It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, My God what have I done?
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...If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.
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To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.
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Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
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He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater detterent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand.
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My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.
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Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question.
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A man wants his virility regarded. A woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. [Here] one is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.
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I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
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We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.
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There's no way to use power for good.
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Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.
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My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.
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If they come prying they can leave curious.
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Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.
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Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind.
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The law of evolution is that the strongest survives.
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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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Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.
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