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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.
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
Knew
Knowledge
Done
Hard
Undo
Never
Begun
Finish
Task
Tasks
More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.
Ursula K. Le Guin
When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I gather that a lot of the pots in the great museum in Baghdad, which we allowed to be looted and then gutted, are now for sale to the highest bidder on the art and archeology black market. This is good capitalism, I guess, while a museum, being a public trust and accessible to all, is anticapitalist, pretty damn near socialist in fact.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Do you know how to read? No. It is one of the black arts. He nodded. But a useful one, he said.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I do not care what comes after I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.
Ursula K. Le Guin
There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Age and illness made one a dualist
Ursula K. Le Guin
If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.
Ursula K. Le Guin
What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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