Quote

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
Learn
Skill
Stress
Questions
Skills
Answer
Darkness
Answers
Unanswerable
Times
Needful

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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They can send death at once, but life is slower.
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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Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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When I'm writing I don't dream much it's like the dreaming gets used in the writing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.
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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Animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do.We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. [. . .] The animals need only be and do.We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman's power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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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Truth is a matter of the imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin