Quote

To see a candle's light, one must take it into a dark place. This is the same as to see the good and be grateful, one must compare and contrast it with something worse - not better!

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
Grateful
Something
Worse
Good
Dark
Place
Light
Candle
Contrast
Better
Compare
Take
Gratitude
Must

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine time patience
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I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons there was one of them just now that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.
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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 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?
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In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.
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What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. If I deny my own profound relationship with evil I deny my own reality. I cannot do, or make I can only undo, unmake.
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The light is the left hand of darkness.
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Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.
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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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Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.
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A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
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Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.
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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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Science fiction is not prescriptive it is descriptive.
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Very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be.
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It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist.
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As a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing,but does only and wholly what he must do.
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Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?
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All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.
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But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.
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