Quote

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
Cannot
Coinage
Power
Bargain
States
Recognizes
Bargains
Coins
Issues
State
Individual

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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No society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.
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If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. It's only a passing moment, but even as it passes the heart knows it cannot change.
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The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
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It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist.
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Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.
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Love is the true condition of human life.
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Very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be.
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When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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To be whole is to be part true voyage is return.
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Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however - that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc
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Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can't step into the same river twice. Life--evolution--the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy--existence itself--is essentially change.
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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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Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.
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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.
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The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one's true identity in both.
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Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
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The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.
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If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
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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