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You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.

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
Sand
Follow
Decision
Evil
Change
Pebble
Must
Pebbles
Thing
Good
Grain

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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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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Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.
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What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair...Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.
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Almost everything is double like that for adolescents their lies are true and their truths are lies, and their hearts are broken by the world. They gyre and fall they see through everything, and are blind.
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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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The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
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Great artists make the roads good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby.
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It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself ... both and one. A shadow on snow.
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This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said...'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I know that nobody who hasn't been in battle or under attack can know what war is. But even in terms of being safe at home, it's also true that many Americans who think they know what being at war is, don't. Including, of course, George W. Bush and his people. They don't have a clue.
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The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
Ursula K. Le Guin