Quote

We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, in all its forms, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?

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
Nothing
Sun
Life
Tried
Thousand
Millennia
Single
Histories
Rest
Anarchism
Born
Hundreds
Form
Civilized
Everything
Forms

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The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.
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There's seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.
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That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.
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There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
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There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.
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I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?
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At the pit's bottom is no anger.
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A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.
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Science fiction is not prescriptive it is descriptive.
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I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time I mean joy.
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The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
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A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.
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One man may as easily destroy, as govern: be King or Anti-King.
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It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in might making right power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
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If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.
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The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!
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There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.
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In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.
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No society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.
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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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