Quote

Sometimes one's very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art it makes the work inexhaustible.

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
Art
Angry
Sometimes
Reader
Real
Close
Mean
Leave
Work
Point
Clinch
Free
Preaches
Means
Inexhaustible
Makes
Decide

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
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Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can't step into the same river twice. Life--evolution--the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy--existence itself--is essentially change.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
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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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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In art, 'good enough' is not good enough.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
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What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything. What you build up your world from, your local, intelligible rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything. . . . . All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do.We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. [. . .] The animals need only be and do.We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The light is the left hand of darkness.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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True understanding is the spur of genius
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
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In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.
Ursula K. Le Guin