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I don't want to be a propagandist, no matter how good the cause. I want to tell stories. It's just that the stories have to square with my consciousness as a woman and my conscience as a human being.
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
Matter
Cause
Good
Consciousness
Causes
Woman
Tell
Propagandist
Stories
Square
Human
Squares
Humans
Conscience
More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. 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
In innocence there is no strength against evil, said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. But there is strength in it for good.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.
Ursula K. Le Guin
How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn't saved, isn't taught?
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
What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything. What you build up your world from, your local, intelligible rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything. . . . . All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Truth is a matter of the imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin
As a kitten does what all other kittens do, so a child wants to do what other children do, with a wanting that is as powerful as it is mindless. Since we human beings have to learn what we do, we have to start out that way, but human mindfulness begins where that wish to be the same leaves off.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.
Ursula K. Le Guin
What good is power when you're too wise to use it?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge) by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets) and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Those who dislike fantasy are very often equally bored or repelled by science. They don't like either hobbits, or quasars they don't feel at home with them they don't want complexities, remoteness. If there is any such connection, I'll bet that it is basically an aesthetic one
Ursula K. Le Guin
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?
Ursula K. Le Guin
The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Art and Entertainment are the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work is, the better art it is. To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, is neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.
Ursula K. Le Guin