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Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge) by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets) and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.

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
Lying
Novelist
Free
Predictions
Business
Honored
Charge
Salaried
Prophet
Prediction
Novelists
Uttered
Therefore
Fees
Usually
Prophets

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
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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Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Honestly, orthodoxy concerns me about as much as it concerns your average jackrabbit. I only follow rules that take me where I want to go. If there aren't any rules, I make up my own and follow them strictly.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other--outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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When we're done with it, we may find—if it's a good novel—that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Men who fight wars in winter don't live till spring.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions.
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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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Sure, it's simple, writing for kids... Just as simple as bringing them up.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.
Ursula K. Le Guin