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So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.

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
Behind
Steps
Reserve
Looking
Caution
Firsts
Reserves
Without
Held
Nothing
Childhood
First
Step
Made
Behinds

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The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
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We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
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Even in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been.
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She obeys me, but only because she wants to. It's the only justification for obedience, Ged observed.
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One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies.
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One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.
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Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?
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Great artists make the roads good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby.
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She'll die.' 'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive.
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The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
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There are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
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Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger.
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In art, 'good enough' is not good enough.
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Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.
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He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater detterent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand.
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Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.
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The creative adult is the child who has survived.
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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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There is a limited number of plots. There is no limit to the number of stories.
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Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot.
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