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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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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
Recognize
Lead
Fiction
Doe
Things
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
Sometimes you must go against the wheel's turn.
Ursula K. Le Guin
It always seemed to me they're sort of alike ... magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Great artists make the roads good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however - that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc
Ursula K. Le Guin
To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
Ursula K. Le Guin
If your voice is heard by more people because you've earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation.
Ursula K. Le Guin
If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.
Ursula K. Le Guin
My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.
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
In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.
Ursula K. Le Guin
One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies.
Ursula K. Le Guin
We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.
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
I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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