Quote

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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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
Life
Tell
Local
Infinitesimal
World
Order
Rational
Intelligible
Stories
Reflection
Coherent
Human
Humility
Glitter
Everything
Build
Momentary
Humans
Knowledge
Select
Nothing
Story
Arbitrary
Every
Less
Locals

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance of joy.
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A man who doesn't detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.
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We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.
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Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
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I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.
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In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.
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There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.
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One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies.
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It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist.
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The unread story is not a story it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
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Go to bed tired is stupid.
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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people .
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The creative adult is the child who has survived.
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The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.
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A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
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Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so do nothing because it seems good to do so do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.
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Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.
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I don't want to be a propagandist, no matter how good the cause. I want to tell stories. It's just that the stories have to square with my consciousness as a woman and my conscience as a human being.
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You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said...'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised.
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From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.
Ursula K. Le Guin