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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
Thing
Pebbles
Good
Grain
Sand
Follow
Decision
Evil
Change
Must
Pebble

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.
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The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes.
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Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
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No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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You know, I don't think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn't. Probably because I don't want to start thinking, Am I popular? I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It was men's ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Hope is a slow business.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical...There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
Ursula K. Le Guin