Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they're not blueprints for action, ever.
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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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'Why are you always so full of answers?''Because life’s so full of questions.'
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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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What was the good working for freedom all your life and ending up without any freedom at all?
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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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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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What's to gain by silence?
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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
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All I know is the dark, the night underground. And that’s all there really is. That’s all there is to know, in the end. The silence, and the dark. You know everything, wizard. But I know one thing - the one true thing!
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Go to bed; tired is stupid.
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They had learned how to listen for the sense of the meeting, not the voice of the loudest. They had learned that they must judge each time whether obedience was necessary and right, or misplaced and wrong. They had learned that the act of violence is the act of weakness, and that the spirit’s strength lies in holding fast to the truth.
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'Why must there be war?' 'Oh Lavinia, what a woman's question that is! Because men are men.'
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Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
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I haven't any strength, I haven't any character, I'm a born tool. I haven't any destiny. All I have is dreams. And now other people run them.
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What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
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All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.
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What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the greatest revolution of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens.
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Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
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Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.
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And I know that all I understand about living is having your work to do, and being able to do it. That’s the pleasure, and the glory, and all. And if you can’t do the work, or it’s taken from you, then what’s any good? You have to have something....
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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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He had almost yielded, but not quite. He had not consented. It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
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Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.