Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. God speaks, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
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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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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.
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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.
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Where my guides lead me in kindness I follow, follow lightly, and there are no footprints in the dust behind us.
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I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark.
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All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.
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It is light that defeats the dark.
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She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary.
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'The first lesson on Roke, and the last is, Do what is needful! And no more.''The lessons in between, then, must consist in learning what is needful.''They do.'
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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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The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel.
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It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
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By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.
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Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.
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In the self-important, Falco reflected, there is always room for a little more self-importance.
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Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.
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Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
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The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
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Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
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I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
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Obsessed with tricking the girl, he had fallen into the trap he laid for her. Bitterly he recognised that he was always believing his own lies, caught in nets he had elaborately woven.
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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
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He had almost yielded, but not quite. He had not consented. It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.