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Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however - that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc

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
Justice
Destructive
Happiness
Luxury
Neither
Exuberance
Based
Category
Comfort
Etc
However
Unnecessary
Necessary
Categories
Middle
Discrimination

More quotes by 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.
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Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.
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In war everybody is a prisoner.
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A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.
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To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
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It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself ... both and one. A shadow on snow.
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Success is somebody else's failure.
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You can go home again...so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
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It is useless work that darkens the heart.
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Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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When the enemy enthusiastically embraces you, and the fellow countrymen bitterly reject you, it is hard not to wonder if you are, in fact, a traitor.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Sure, it's simple, writing for kids... Just as simple as bringing them up.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud.
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.
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The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Even in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
Ursula K. Le Guin