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You know, I don't think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn't. Probably because I don't want to start thinking, Am I popular? I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school.

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
School
Popular
Book
Spent
Much
Reader
Way
Probably
Time
High
Think
Start
Thinking
Doesn
Connects
Another
Readers

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, in all its forms, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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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It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past. Therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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...If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.
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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If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Sometimes I not only stand there and take it, I even smile at them and say I'm sorry. When I feel that smile coming onto my face, I wish I could take my face off and stamp on it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Statesmen remember things selectively.
Ursula K. Le Guin