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George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.

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
Defective
Overnight
Orientation
Correct
George
Impossible
Reality

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.
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You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.
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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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What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If your voice is heard by more people because you've earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair...Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Owning is owing, having is hoarding.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
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It is useless work that darkens the heart.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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...If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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No matter how intelligent a man is, he can't see what he doesn't know how to see.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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We read books to find out who we are.
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Do you know how to read? No. It is one of the black arts. He nodded. But a useful one, he said.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin