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If you want to know all about the sea ... and ask the sea itself, what does it say? Grumble grumble swish swish. It is too busy being itself to know anything about itself.

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
Busy
Sea
Asks
Doe
Anything
Swish
Grumble

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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Success is somebody else's failure.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge) by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets) and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The great authors share their souls with us- literally.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible it is without significance.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Paradise is for those who make paradise.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Love is the true condition of human life.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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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Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It is good to have an end to journey towards but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in might making right power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Why can I never set my heart on a possible thing?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Statesmen remember things selectively.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Hope is a slow business.
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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At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.
Ursula K. Le Guin