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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

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
Definitions
Invention
Fiction
Imaginative
Think
Imitation
Thinking
Realistic
Superior
Superiors
Definition

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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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.
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One man may as easily destroy, as govern: be King or Anti-King.
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Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.
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Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
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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.
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A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere.
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The unread story is not a story it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
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Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.
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We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
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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.
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Sometimes you must go against the wheel's turn.
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A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.
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I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?
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Do you know how to read? No. It is one of the black arts. He nodded. But a useful one, he said.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.
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there are times when you have to speak because silence is betrayal.
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O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn't saved, isn't taught?
Ursula K. Le Guin