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Now they came back to him, on this night he was seventeen years old. All the years and places of his brief broken life came within mind's reach and made a whole again. He knew once more, at last, after this long, bitter, waisted time, who he was and where he was. But where he must go in the years to come, that he could not see; and he feared to see it.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
To read and to write. Some writers have to be told to write. They think their job is to meet agents and have experiences and they can just be rich and famous. Their job is to write. Some really don't realize that. And you can't write unless you read.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.
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 -
No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
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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The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
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 -
Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
My Real Children starts quietly, then suddenly takes you on two roller-coaster rides at once, swooping dizzily through a double panorama and ending in a sort of super Sophie's Choice. A daring tour de force.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, or anything else.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I don't believe that a writer 'gets' (takes into the head) an 'idea' (some sort of mental object) 'from' somewhere, and then turns it into words, and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn't work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow into a story.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.
Ursula K. Le Guin -
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