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It is not human to be without shame and without desire.

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
Human
Humans
Without
Shame
Desire

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And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles and I would be content.
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A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.
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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
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Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so do nothing because it seems good to do so do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.
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In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.
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We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.
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It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
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The backside of heroism is often rather sad women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul.
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Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.
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All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?
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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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If you want to know all about the sea ... and ask the sea itself, what does it say? Grumble grumble swish swish. It is too busy being itself to know anything about itself.
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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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Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions.
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I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.
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The law of evolution is that the strongest survives.
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Success is somebody else's failure.
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The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.
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Absolute freedom is absolute responsibility.
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What is life without incompatible realities?
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