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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
Skills
Answer
Darkness
Answers
Unanswerable
Times
Needful
Learn
Skill
Stress
Questions
More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I have become very critical of the whole book award system and could preach on that subject for quite a while, but I do know what an award can mean to a writer early in her career. It can give an essential validation.
Ursula K. Le Guin
To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
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We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
Ursula K. Le Guin
To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn't know they knew.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
Ursula K. Le Guin
We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Infinite are the arguments of mages.
Ursula K. Le Guin
What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can't live on realism alone.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.
Ursula K. Le Guin
All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.
Ursula K. Le Guin
No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Where there's property, there's theft.
Ursula K. Le Guin
