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

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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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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Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.
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Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.
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The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
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But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
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When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
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The backside of heroism is often rather sad women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul.
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A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.
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Sleeping people are so remote.... Right here, but out of communication. That's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy. The sleeper turns his back on everyone.
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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One must work with time and not against it.
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Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.
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Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed.
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There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.
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We broke the world to make it whole.
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Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Besides, when you say you're a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it's kind of irresistible.
Ursula K. Le Guin