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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
Shame
Desire
Human
Humans
Without

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All knowledge is partial, infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth.
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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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There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.
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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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The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.
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Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed.
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First sentences are doors to worlds.
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Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
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Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.
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I'm not a quester or a searcher for the truth. I don't really think there is one answer, so I never went looking for it. My impulse is less questing and more playful. I like trying on ideas and ways of life and religious approaches. I'm just not a good candidate for conversion.
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The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.
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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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The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.
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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
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This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
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Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?
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We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
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All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.
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After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.
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What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.
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