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

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In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.
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What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. If I deny my own profound relationship with evil I deny my own reality. I cannot do, or make I can only undo, unmake.
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At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.
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What is more arrogant than honesty?
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It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
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Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.
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What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything. What you build up your world from, your local, intelligible rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything. . . . . All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection.
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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.
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She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary.
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Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.
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Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.
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No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.
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In innocence there is no strength against evil, said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. But there is strength in it for good.
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If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. It's only a passing moment, but even as it passes the heart knows it cannot change.
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My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.
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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty not knowing what comes next.
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Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.
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He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.
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Dreams take short cuts.
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The story is not in the plot but in the telling.
Ursula K. Le Guin