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True understanding is the spur of genius

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
Genius
Understanding
True
Spur
Spurs
Mentor

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George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
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Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.
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I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.
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Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge) by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets) and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.
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If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
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At the pit's bottom is no anger.
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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 are no right answers to wrong questions.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I write with all my heart
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Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
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Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?
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There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The machine conceals the machinations.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Truth is a matter of the imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God's truth, the universe at once began to exist.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Love's just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don't have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To be whole is to be part true voyage is return.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.
Ursula K. Le Guin