Quote

If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.

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
Character
Listen
Writing
Writer
People
Fiction
Control
Talk
Though
Write
Censor
Tell
Quiet

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Age and illness made one a dualist
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Progress means nothing to presence.
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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.
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Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.
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All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.
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A man wants his virility regarded. A woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. [Here] one is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.
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Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
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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.
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The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper.
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Alone, no one wins freedom.
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I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.
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Fiction—and poetry and drama— cleanse the doors of perception.
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Why can I never set my heart on a possible thing?
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The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness.
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Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art - the art of words.
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Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.
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By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.
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The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.
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The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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