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

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Men who fight wars in winter don't live till spring.
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
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It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.
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The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.
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Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.
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Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
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Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings
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Living in a world that is valued only as gain, an ever-expanding world-as-frontier that has no worth of its own, no fullness of its own, you live in danger of losing your own worth to yourself. That's when you begin to listen to the voices from the other side, and to ask questions of failure and the dark.
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Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.
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At the pit's bottom is no anger.
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The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
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The king was pregnant.
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In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell.
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What is love of one's country is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one musn't make a virtue of it, or a profession...Insofar as I love life, I love [my country], but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.
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We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.
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Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions.
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The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
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The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.
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