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

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.
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When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
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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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Go to bed tired is stupid.
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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.
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To read and to write. Some writers have to be told to write. They think their job is to meet agents and have experiences and they can just be rich and famous. Their job is to write. Some really don't realize that. And you can't write unless you read.
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She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary.
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Success is somebody else's failure.
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A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.
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Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I gather that a lot of the pots in the great museum in Baghdad, which we allowed to be looted and then gutted, are now for sale to the highest bidder on the art and archeology black market. This is good capitalism, I guess, while a museum, being a public trust and accessible to all, is anticapitalist, pretty damn near socialist in fact.
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When people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always WAS a writer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past. Therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.
Ursula K. Le Guin