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To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.

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
Power
Good
Claim
Likely
Claims
Wise
Understand
Ends

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
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Age and illness made one a dualist
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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.
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Where there's property, there's theft.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There's a great fear of the imagination. It's a dangerous thing. It's out of control, it's subversive.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it... By using words well they strengthen their souls.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine time patience
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place.
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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I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.
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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Those who dislike fantasy are very often equally bored or repelled by science. They don't like either hobbits, or quasars they don't feel at home with them they don't want complexities, remoteness. If there is any such connection, I'll bet that it is basically an aesthetic one
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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In innocence there is no strength against evil, said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. But there is strength in it for good.
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
Ursula K. Le Guin
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That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.
Ursula K. Le Guin