Quote

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

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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
Doe
Stones
Crafts
Find
Works
Sets
Real
Question
Essentially
Work
Free
Stone
Always
Artist
Visible
Durable
Art
Essential
Statue
Shows
Core
Statues
True
Essentials
Craft

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion.
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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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical...There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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When we're done with it, we may find—if it's a good novel—that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
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Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Progress means nothing to presence.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Truth is a matter of the imagination.
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin