Quote

All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.

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
Knowledge
Untrue
Another
Pattern
Cannot
Locals
Truth
Local
Part
Larger
Back
Patterns
Whole
Seen
Make
Seeing
Partial

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.
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I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
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... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.
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It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
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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.
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In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell.
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I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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By and large books are mankind's best invention.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do.We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. [. . .] The animals need only be and do.We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other--outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The unread story is not a story it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
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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We read books to find out who we are.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
Ursula K. Le Guin