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The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.

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
Devours
Feeds
Growing
Desire
Power

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To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
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I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.
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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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If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance of joy.
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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.
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When the enemy enthusiastically embraces you, and the fellow countrymen bitterly reject you, it is hard not to wonder if you are, in fact, a traitor.
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He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.
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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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Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
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A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.
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There's no way to use power for good.
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I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark.
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You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
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Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else
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There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.
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Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed.
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Science fiction is not prescriptive it is descriptive.
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While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
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To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
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To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.
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