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But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord. It might to keep it open.

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
Doesn
Might
Take
Door
Men
Doors
Thousand
Open
Lord
Keep

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It always seemed to me they're sort of alike ... magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.
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But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.
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Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?
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I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons there was one of them just now that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.
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We broke the world to make it whole.
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Fiction—and poetry and drama— cleanse the doors of perception.
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O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then.
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
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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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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
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The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
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A man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes' witness, if those with him saw nothing.
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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.
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What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
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But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
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A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be it tells itself I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words and the writer's job is to be its medium.
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We read books to find out who we are.
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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 story is not in the plot but in the telling.
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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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