Quote

The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes.

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
Men
Eyes
Sea
Meadows
Dark
Mountain
Sharks
Eye
Green
Rabbits
Beautiful
Balance
Cruel
Hands
Dying
Mountains
Shrieks
Also
Terrible
Hidden
Clench
Earth
Full
Cruelty
Rabbit
Great
Fire
Bright
Kindly

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
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I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud.
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When action grows unprofitable, gather information when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
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All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?
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If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.
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Paradise is for those who make paradise.
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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
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Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.
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Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.
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If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. It's only a passing moment, but even as it passes the heart knows it cannot change.
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In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.
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Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
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It is not human to be without shame and without desire.
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Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.
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You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.
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Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.
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Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however - that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc
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A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere.
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
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I don't believe that a writer 'gets' (takes into the head) an 'idea' (some sort of mental object) 'from' somewhere, and then turns it into words, and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn't work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow into a story.
Ursula K. Le Guin