Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes - Page 12

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• We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Dark, Thinking, Night

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.11, Ultramarine Publishing

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• To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Women, Order, Law

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.11, Grove Press

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• The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Destiny, Men, Empathy

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.43, Ultramarine Publishing

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• Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  God, Voice, Political

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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. Exploiting the apocalypse, selling the holocaust, is a pornography. For the ultimate selling job on ultimate violence one must read those works of fiction issued by our government as manuals of civil defense, in which you learn that there's nothing to be afraid of if you've stockpiled lots of dried fruit.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Jobs, Business, Acceptance

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• Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  War, Hero, Lavinia

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2008). “Lavinia”, p.132, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Love is the true condition of human life.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Love Is, Human Life, Humans

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• Excess is excrement, ... Excrement retained in the body is a poison.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Poison, Excess, Body

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• The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Character, Fiction, Granted

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• Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Telling The Truth, Distrust

  Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood (1980). “The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction”, p.158, Ultramarine Publishing

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• I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Doors, Fiction

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• I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  War, House, Cooking

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• Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Hands, Two Sides, Life And Death

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “The Farthest Shore”, p.69, Simon and Schuster

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• If you want to know all about the sea ... and ask the sea itself, what does it say? Grumble grumble swish swish. It is too busy being itself to know anything about itself.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Sea, Doe, Want

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• Manipulated, one manipulates others.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Manipulate

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “The Other Wind”, p.78, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Men, Exception

  Ursula K. LeGuin (2015). “The Dispossessed”, p.27, Hachette UK

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• The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Grateful, Revolution

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.107, Grove Press

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• To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Rocks, Rivers, Choices

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2016). “The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin”, p.283, Simon and Schuster

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• Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Fiction, Science Fiction

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• From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Wise, Eye, Animal

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “A Wizard of Earthsea”, p.98, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Needs, Enough

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “A Wizard of Earthsea”, p.10, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Cutting, Soul, Enemy

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• The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical...There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Peace, Hurt, Law

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• If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Character, People

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2015). “Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story”, p.100, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• If you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you're writing. And if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn't flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Art, Motivation, Mean

  "Author Talk". Interview, www.teenreads.com. September 2006.

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