Quote

Little mirrors were attached to the front of their cars, at which they glanced to see where they had been then they stared ahead again. I had thought that only beetles had this delusion of Progress.

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
Thought
Cars
Littles
Mirrors
Little
Ahead
Car
Beetles
Fronts
Glanced
Front
Stared
Progress
Attached
Science
Delusion

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I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
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I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.
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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.
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Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.
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Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.
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Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.
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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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You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice.
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A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
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I gather that a lot of the pots in the great museum in Baghdad, which we allowed to be looted and then gutted, are now for sale to the highest bidder on the art and archeology black market. This is good capitalism, I guess, while a museum, being a public trust and accessible to all, is anticapitalist, pretty damn near socialist in fact.
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The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
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Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.
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Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.
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My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.
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The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.
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My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.
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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.
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You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
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We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, in all its forms, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?
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They can send death at once, but life is slower.
Ursula K. Le Guin