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The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review.
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
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Poet
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Science Fiction Writer
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Berkeley
California
Ursula Kroeber
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
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More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
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
All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.
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
Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed.
Ursula K. Le Guin
How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn't saved, isn't taught?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Success is somebody else's failure.
Ursula K. Le Guin
To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
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
Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Not even need and love can defeat fate.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Living in a world that is valued only as gain, an ever-expanding world-as-frontier that has no worth of its own, no fullness of its own, you live in danger of losing your own worth to yourself. That's when you begin to listen to the voices from the other side, and to ask questions of failure and the dark.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I have become very critical of the whole book award system and could preach on that subject for quite a while, but I do know what an award can mean to a writer early in her career. It can give an essential validation.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Even a poet cannot get everything right.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its weakness. But fantasy seems to be eternal and omnipresent and always attractive to kids.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
Ursula K. Le Guin