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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

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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
Mind
Minds
World
Materials
Build
Reader
Making
Give
Apathy
Giving
Readers
Writing
Empathy

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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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
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The backside of heroism is often rather sad women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Success is somebody else's failure.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
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To oppose something is to maintain it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It always seemed to me they're sort of alike ... magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.
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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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Living in a world that is valued only as gain, an ever-expanding world-as-frontier that has no worth of its own, no fullness of its own, you live in danger of losing your own worth to yourself. That's when you begin to listen to the voices from the other side, and to ask questions of failure and the dark.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Much arrogance is necessary equipment for an artist, I think. Not sufficient, but necessary. It carries one across the gaps.
Ursula K. Le Guin