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Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it's simply meaningless. We don't live in order to die, we live in order to live.

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
Dies
Forms
Heaven
Christianity
Bigs
Deal
Order
Deals
Doctrinaire
Form
Rest
Judaism
Live
Simply
Meaningless
Hell
Islam
Belief
Buddhism

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.
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Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.
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Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind.
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You can go home again...so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
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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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A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.
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To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
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What is love of one's country is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one musn't make a virtue of it, or a profession...Insofar as I love life, I love [my country], but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.
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Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.
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Sure, it's simple, writing for kids... Just as simple as bringing them up.
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Very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be.
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To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else you must have another goal then you walk a different road.
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The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.
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Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing.
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Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.
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What good is power when you're too wise to use it?
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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
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It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Not even need and love can defeat fate.
Ursula K. Le Guin