Quote

The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

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
Models
Civilization
Reproductions
Pure
Virus
Environment
Viruses
Information
Reproduction
Bits
Model
Modern
Endless
Turns
Western

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.
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If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance of joy.
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Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
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Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.
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Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot.
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Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.
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Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind.
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Sometimes I not only stand there and take it, I even smile at them and say I'm sorry. When I feel that smile coming onto my face, I wish I could take my face off and stamp on it.
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Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed.
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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 old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.
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Animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do.We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. [. . .] The animals need only be and do.We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom.
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Greed puts out the sun.
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Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge) by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets) and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.
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You can go home again...so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
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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Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
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There is a limited number of plots. There is no limit to the number of stories.
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So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.
Ursula K. Le Guin