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What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up

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
Must
Organize
Bottom
Else
Young

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Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.
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In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.
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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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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
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It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
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I write with all my heart
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Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.
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What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything. What you build up your world from, your local, intelligible rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything. . . . . All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection.
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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.
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At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.
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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.
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First sentences are doors to worlds.
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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.
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To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.
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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.
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If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.
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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty not knowing what comes next.
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The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.
Ursula K. Le Guin