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Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.

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
Used
Concept
Genre
Useful
Concepts

More quotes by 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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I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons there was one of them just now that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.
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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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 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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I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The world is in balance . To light a candle is to cast a shadow.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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All of us have to learn how to invent our lives , make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people .
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, My God what have I done?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine time patience
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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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
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In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Truth is a matter of the imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Where there's property, there's theft.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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It is useless work that darkens the heart.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
Ursula K. Le Guin