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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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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
Habit
Literature
Lying
Demagogues
Half
Ideologues
Best
Truths
Believe
Believing
Defense
Lies

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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The backside of heroism is often rather sad women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, in all its forms, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.
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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It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man's fate is not important. If it is not, what is? He could not endure those remembered words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer's primary objective, I am not teaching writing I'm teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Even a poet cannot get everything right.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past. Therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It is hard, I found, to be called traitor. Strange how hard it is, for it's an easy name to call another man.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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What is life without incompatible realities?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.
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. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.
Ursula K. Le Guin