Quote

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.

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
World
Evil
Grain
Summoning
Change
Sand
Pebble
Power
Changing
Wizard
Need
Serve
Pebbles
Must
Follow
Wizards
Needs
Balance
Equilibrium
Thing
Dangerous
Shake
Good
Knowledge
Shakes

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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.
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The light is the left hand of darkness.
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.
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If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.
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One must work with time and not against it.
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What good is power when you're too wise to use it?
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Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.
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If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. ...But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.
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I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time I mean joy.
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If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
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To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.
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From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.
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It is hard, I found, to be called traitor. Strange how hard it is, for it's an easy name to call another man.
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Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.
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All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.
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In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.
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Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.
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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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Even a poet cannot get everything right.
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