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It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.
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
Smoke
Ancestors
May
Ancestor
Thing
Altogether
Nose
Grandfather
Arsonist
Criminal
Arsonists
Noses
Bequeath
Criminals
Smelling
More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
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
What is love of one's country is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one musn't make a virtue of it, or a profession...Insofar as I love life, I love [my country], but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.
Ursula K. Le Guin
There is neither source nor end, for all things are in the Center of Time. As all the stars may be reflected in a round raindrop falling in the night: so too do all the stars reflect the raindrop. There is neither darkness nor death, for all things are, in the Light of the Moment, and their end and their beginning are one.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The more defensive a society, the more conformist.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
There's no way to use power for good.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
What good is power when you're too wise to use it?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?
Ursula K. Le Guin
The story is not in the plot but in the telling.
Ursula K. Le Guin
A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.
Ursula K. Le Guin