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Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas.

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
Writers
Interested
Life
Commas
Prose
Mostly

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not every planet can do it it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun's first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumberable wind-stirred branches.
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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It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Alone, no one wins freedom.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The king was pregnant.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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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It is not human to be without shame and without desire.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Yet we were rescued by that fancy, and saved by a myth.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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We read books to find out who we are.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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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Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.
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