Quote

What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair...Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.

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
Give
Seventeen
Littles
Armor
Little
Refuse
Giving
Complete
Years
Despair
Love
Consider
Life
Hope
Relied
Death
Undertake

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
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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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Scientific truth will out, you can't hide the sun under a stone.
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Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger.
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Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything. What you build up your world from, your local, intelligible rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything. . . . . All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
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Yet we were rescued by that fancy, and saved by a myth.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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What is love of one's country is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Little mirrors were attached to the front of their cars, at which they glanced to see where they had been then they stared ahead again. I had thought that only beetles had this delusion of Progress.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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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The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time I mean joy.
Ursula K. Le Guin