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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.

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
Modern
Shalt
Decision
Confuse
Moral
Abstraction
Wrong
Genuine
Whether
Thou
Often
Serve
Right
Morality
Abstractions
Thing
Kill
Weaken

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Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.
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One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.
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You can go home again...so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
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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.
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Maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it.
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See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
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The king was pregnant.
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It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.
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To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past. Therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.
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I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.
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The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.
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There's seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was.
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I don't believe that a writer 'gets' (takes into the head) an 'idea' (some sort of mental object) 'from' somewhere, and then turns it into words, and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn't work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow into a story.
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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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We sleep researchers like cats, you know they sleep a lot!
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Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place.
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There's a great fear of the imagination. It's a dangerous thing. It's out of control, it's subversive.
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Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.
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If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.
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A man who doesn't detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.
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