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There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
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
Age
Peculiarities
Point
Disapproval
Whether
Twenty
Else
Twenties
Around
Choose
Make
Rest
Life
Virtue
Like
Everybody
More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
Ursula K. Le Guin
What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can't live on realism alone.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord. It might to keep it open.
Ursula K. Le Guin
If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin--the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin's thinking.
Ursula K. Le Guin
We sleep researchers like cats, you know they sleep a lot!
Ursula K. Le Guin
The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.
Ursula K. Le Guin
... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
Ursula K. Le Guin
When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.
Ursula K. Le Guin
It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in might making right power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
Ursula K. Le Guin
We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
Ursula K. Le Guin
To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?
Ursula K. Le Guin
In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
Ursula K. Le Guin