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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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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
Reality
Poverty
Dreaming
Dream
Terrible
Awake
Live
Millions
Thirty
People
Somebody
Wide
American
Million
Success
Including
Keep
Places
Else
Failure

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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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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To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people .
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Even a poet cannot get everything right.
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The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
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If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.
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George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
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Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
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Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
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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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I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
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We broke the world to make it whole.
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All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.
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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But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Great artists make the roads good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction — you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.
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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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it's simply meaningless. We don't live in order to die, we live in order to live.
Ursula K. Le Guin