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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
Anything
Swish
Grumble
Busy
Sea
Asks
Doe
More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
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
Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed.
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
One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
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
The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, or anything else.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Why can I never set my heart on a possible thing?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Excess is excrement, ... Excrement retained in the body is a poison.
Ursula K. Le Guin
This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
Ursula K. Le Guin
It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else
Ursula K. Le Guin
Hope is a slow business.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Besides, when you say you're a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it's kind of irresistible.
Ursula K. Le Guin
If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
She'll die.' 'Aye. That's a consequence of being alive.
Ursula K. Le Guin