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

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We sleep researchers like cats, you know they sleep a lot!
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Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.
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Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.
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Statesmen remember things selectively.
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We broke the world to make it whole.
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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
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Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced.
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If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.
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The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.
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A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.
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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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If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.
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No matter how intelligent a man is, he can't see what he doesn't know how to see.
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To see a candle's light, one must take it into a dark place. This is the same as to see the good and be grateful, one must compare and contrast it with something worse - not better!
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Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
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No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
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Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.
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I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
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Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust.
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Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art - the art of words.
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