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If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.
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
Opposite
Opposites
Civilization
Either
War
Two
Things
More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin
A man who doesn't detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man's fate is not important. If it is not, what is? He could not endure those remembered words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Infinite are the arguments of mages.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
Ursula K. Le Guin
For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.
Ursula K. Le Guin
But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so do nothing because it seems good to do so do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
Ursula K. Le Guin
What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however - that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc
Ursula K. Le Guin
This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
Ursula K. Le Guin
There is neither source nor end, for all things are in the Center of Time. As all the stars may be reflected in a round raindrop falling in the night: so too do all the stars reflect the raindrop. There is neither darkness nor death, for all things are, in the Light of the Moment, and their end and their beginning are one.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.
Ursula K. Le Guin