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The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

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
Says
Words
Novelist
Artist
Novelists
Cannot
Medium
Doe
Mediums
Whose
Deals
Fiction

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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I'm not a quester or a searcher for the truth. I don't really think there is one answer, so I never went looking for it. My impulse is less questing and more playful. I like trying on ideas and ways of life and religious approaches. I'm just not a good candidate for conversion.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one's true identity in both.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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When action grows unprofitable, gather information when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
Ursula K. Le Guin