Quote

Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.

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
Going
Science
However
Tombs
Way
Facts
Fiction
Conceived
Things
Else
Serious
Womb
Like
Stories
Story
Belly
People
Everything
Actually
Properly
Feel
Fact
Describe
Sack
Feels
Funny
Vast
Tomb
Trying
Universe
Relate
Unending

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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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We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A man who doesn't detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.
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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At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair...Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Almost everything is double like that for adolescents their lies are true and their truths are lies, and their hearts are broken by the world. They gyre and fall they see through everything, and are blind.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?
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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Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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