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Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.

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
Ghetto
Genre
Looked
Glum
Fiction
Sealing
Imagination
Dysfunctional
Wonder
Realist
Society
Suburbs
Use
Denying

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The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.
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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.
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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.
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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
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It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
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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
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It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
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Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question.
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The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
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We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
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In innocence there is no strength against evil, said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. But there is strength in it for good.
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Love is the true condition of human life.
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But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power...It must follow knowledge, and serve need.
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My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.
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Hope is a slow business.
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The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.
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All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
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George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.
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This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
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