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To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
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
Oneself
Great
Thing
Rare
More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.
Ursula K. Le Guin
But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.
Ursula K. Le Guin
You know, I don't think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn't. Probably because I don't want to start thinking, Am I popular? I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school.
Ursula K. Le Guin
It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
Ursula K. Le Guin
There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
Ursula K. Le Guin
No society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
Ursula K. Le Guin
What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The word must be heard in silence there must be darkness to see the stars.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.
Ursula K. Le Guin
When I'm writing I don't dream much it's like the dreaming gets used in the writing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
To oppose something is to maintain it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
In war everybody is a prisoner.
Ursula K. Le Guin
When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.
Ursula K. Le Guin