Quote

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

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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
Working
Pain
Thought
Even
Thing
Time
Wasted
Counts
Instead

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it's simply meaningless. We don't live in order to die, we live in order to live.
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What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. If I deny my own profound relationship with evil I deny my own reality. I cannot do, or make I can only undo, unmake.
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There are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
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Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
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He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.
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Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.
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It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man's fate is not important. If it is not, what is? He could not endure those remembered words.
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I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.
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This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
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The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.
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In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.
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The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.
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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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My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Truth is a matter of the imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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One must work with time and not against it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.
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By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.
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The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.
Ursula K. Le Guin