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Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

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
Well
Writing
People
Writer
Hear
Secret
Wells

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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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
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Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.
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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I don't want to be a propagandist, no matter how good the cause. I want to tell stories. It's just that the stories have to square with my consciousness as a woman and my conscience as a human being.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It is not human to be without shame and without desire.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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What good is power when you're too wise to use it?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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What is love of one's country is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin--the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin's thinking.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction — you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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All knowledge is partial, infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
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I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.
Ursula K. Le Guin