Quote

A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.

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
Animal
Even
Sinless
Blameless
Whatsoever
Intentions
Machine
Intention
Machines

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said...'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised.
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To make a thief, make an owner to create crime, create laws.
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Success is somebody else's failure.
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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
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its weakness. But fantasy seems to be eternal and omnipresent and always attractive to kids.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in might making right power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Almost everything is double like that for adolescents their lies are true and their truths are lies, and their hearts are broken by the world. They gyre and fall they see through everything, and are blind.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, My God what have I done?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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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I have become very critical of the whole book award system and could preach on that subject for quite a while, but I do know what an award can mean to a writer early in her career. It can give an essential validation.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time I mean joy.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not every planet can do it it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun's first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumberable wind-stirred branches.
Ursula K. Le Guin