Quote

Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn't know they knew.

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
Something
Learn
Imagined
Didn
Burn
Beautiful
Watching
Also
Writers
Launching
Used
Places
Farther
Ever
Control
Flies
Writing
Takes
Planned
Work
Knew
Crash

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The law of evolution is that the strongest survives.
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A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
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To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
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Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.
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Manipulated, one manipulates others.
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The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
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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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Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.
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Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.
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Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can't step into the same river twice. Life--evolution--the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy--existence itself--is essentially change.
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It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
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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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My Real Children starts quietly, then suddenly takes you on two roller-coaster rides at once, swooping dizzily through a double panorama and ending in a sort of super Sophie's Choice. A daring tour de force.
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To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else you must have another goal then you walk a different road.
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We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.
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Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.
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The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
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I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time I mean joy.
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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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