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If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance of joy.

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
Also
Evade
Thrive
Joy
Suffering
Chance

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Even a poet cannot get everything right.
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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 end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
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Where there's property, there's theft.
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Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.
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Sometimes one's very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art it makes the work inexhaustible.
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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.
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There are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
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The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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A man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes' witness, if those with him saw nothing.
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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
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Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question.
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Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
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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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Sometimes I not only stand there and take it, I even smile at them and say I'm sorry. When I feel that smile coming onto my face, I wish I could take my face off and stamp on it.
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This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
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My Real Children starts quietly, then suddenly takes you on two roller-coaster rides at once, swooping dizzily through a double panorama and ending in a sort of super Sophie's Choice. A daring tour de force.
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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.
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We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
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