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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
That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.
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It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.
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The backside of heroism is often rather sad women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul.
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I do not care what comes after I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
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Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.
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Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind.
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Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.
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When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.
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Go to bed tired is stupid.
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The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.
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There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.
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Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.
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Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn't know they knew.
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One must work with time and not against it.
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But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.
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
Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.
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Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?
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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.
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I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
