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Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

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
Living
Ever
Thing
Much
World
Dreamed
Stranger
Greater

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
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How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn't saved, isn't taught?
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A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes.
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The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, or anything else.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, My God what have I done?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Where there's property, there's theft.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I have become very critical of the whole book award system and could preach on that subject for quite a while, but I do know what an award can mean to a writer early in her career. It can give an essential validation.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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You can go home again...so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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We read books to find out who we are.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not every planet can do it it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun's first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumberable wind-stirred branches.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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When action grows unprofitable, gather information when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If you want to know all about the sea ... and ask the sea itself, what does it say? Grumble grumble swish swish. It is too busy being itself to know anything about itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Sometimes one's very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art it makes the work inexhaustible.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.
Ursula K. Le Guin