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The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.

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
Useful
Instructions
Literature
Manuals
Reading
Operating
Best
Visiting
Reason
Literacy
Country
Instruction
Important
Guide
Life
Guides
Manual

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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there are times when you have to speak because silence is betrayal.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I've got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin's not easy.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To hear, one must be silent.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I'm not a quester or a searcher for the truth. I don't really think there is one answer, so I never went looking for it. My impulse is less questing and more playful. I like trying on ideas and ways of life and religious approaches. I'm just not a good candidate for conversion.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
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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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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
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I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I know that nobody who hasn't been in battle or under attack can know what war is. But even in terms of being safe at home, it's also true that many Americans who think they know what being at war is, don't. Including, of course, George W. Bush and his people. They don't have a clue.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. It's only a passing moment, but even as it passes the heart knows it cannot change.
Ursula K. Le Guin