Quote

The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.

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
Found
Beings
Become
Among
Live
Present
Uninhabitable
Need
Face
Hopelessness
Needs
Faces
Inability
Think
Upon
Arise
Thinking
Future
Sacred
World
Hope
Responsible

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To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.
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If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance of joy.
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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.
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Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
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What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices.
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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.
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And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life
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Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.
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But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord. It might to keep it open.
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One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies.
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One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.
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If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.
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He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in.
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In war everybody is a prisoner.
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Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.
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Not even need and love can defeat fate.
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Paradise is for those who make paradise.
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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.
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I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.
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Owning is owing, having is hoarding.
Ursula K. Le Guin