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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.
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
Sense
Facts
Reason
Distressing
Made
Paradox
Myth
Knowledge
Fact
Difficult
More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.
Ursula K. Le Guin
If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.
Ursula K. Le Guin
You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.
Ursula K. Le Guin
To be whole is to be part true voyage is return.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
Ursula K. Le Guin
If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. ...But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.
Ursula K. Le Guin
At the pit's bottom is no anger.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.
Ursula K. Le Guin
All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.
Ursula K. Le Guin
But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
Ursula K. Le Guin
There is a limited number of plots. There is no limit to the number of stories.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. If I deny my own profound relationship with evil I deny my own reality. I cannot do, or make I can only undo, unmake.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
