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To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

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
Darkness
Answers
Unanswerable
Times
Needful
Learn
Skill
Stress
Questions
Skills
Answer

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.
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To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past. Therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.
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The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
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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.
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My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.
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... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
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I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons there was one of them just now that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.
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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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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.
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Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.
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You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.
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I write with all my heart
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The label YA actually means nothing except that the protagonists, or some of them, are young. Publishers like it because it is a secure marketing niche. But the cost of security is exclusion from literary consideration.
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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.
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Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only in the truth.
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All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.
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There's seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.
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Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions.
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