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5d6e9a2
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If you can see a thing whole, it seems that it's always beautiful. Planet,lives...But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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db0f03b
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Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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21de35c
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For if it's all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it's himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8d9338d
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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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war
women
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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fcb8c70
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The machine conceals the machinations.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d201f09
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Progress means nothing to presence.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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65fa134
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The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
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humor
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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dbde686
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All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like--what's going on--what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in t..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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cd2d12f
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This story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed, I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them is false, and it is all one story.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d2387e2
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Excess is excrement, ... Excrement retained in the body is a poison.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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381098e
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Ours is only a little power, seems like, next to theirs," Moss said. "But it goes down deep. It's all roots. It's like an old blackberry thicket. And a wizard's power's like a fir tree, maybe, great and tall and grand, but it'll blow right down in a storm. Nothing kills a blackberry bramble."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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b577241
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Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.
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mourning
solitude
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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de4eb71
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To see a candle's light, one must take it into a dark place.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6af345a
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What is more arrogant than honesty?
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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ab860c5
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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 safe for children to grow up in.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8c7af81
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As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star.
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mythology
passion
poetry
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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01c0494
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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everythin..
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happiness
intellectual
pain
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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96f3242
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Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed.
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universe
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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c0e2290
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There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a253a2b
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Freedom is never very safe.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f3e427b
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How do I know," she said at last, "that you are what you seem to be?" "You don't," Said he. "I don't know what I seem, to you."
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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ed464d3
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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.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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b6dc15c
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The king was pregnant.
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feminist
gender
sci-fi
science-fiction
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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aa18134
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The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, or anything else.
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fish
humor
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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7650892
|
Oh, never and forever aren't for mortals, love. But we won't be parted till I know it's right that we part.
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mythology
parting
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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6c8cce8
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There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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d79baa5
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I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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c1f0784
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You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said...'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised.
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life
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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59aecfa
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If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. It's only a passing moment, but even as it passes the heart knows it cannot change.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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529cfb9
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Time is not duration but intensity; time is the beat and the interval [...]
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time
time-travel
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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8386d9f
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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.
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names
wizard
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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a4c3c85
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Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it's then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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89a9f7a
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We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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5434395
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T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well.
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science-fiction
writing
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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4fa2d1d
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What's wrong with men?" Tenar inquired cautiously. As cautiously, lowering her voice, Moss replied, "I don't know, my dearie. I've thought on it. Often I've thought on it. The best I can say it is like this. A man's in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell." She held up her long, bent, wet fingers as if holding a walnut. "It's hard and strong, that shell, and it's all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that's all. That's al..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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f01104e
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My race is very old," Ketho said. "We have been civilized for a thousand millenia. We have histories of hundreds of those millenia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, with the rest. But have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?"
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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535c89f
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Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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cad2813
|
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? The tale tells how the Lords of Manva hunted & gathered roots & cooked their suppers while they were camped in exile in the foothills of Sul, but it doesn't say what their wives & children were living on in their city left ruined..
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gender
housekeeping
storytelling
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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2e8299a
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At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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055d10a
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Excerpt from Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We'll need writers who can remember freedom - poets, visionaries - realists of a larger reality. Right now, we need writers who know..
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profiteerng
publishers
writing
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Ursula K Le Guin |
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dd93192
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Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.
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privacy
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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9a370a0
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I think what you mostly do when you find you really are alone is to panic. You rush to the opposite extreme and pack yourself into groups - clubs, teams, societies, types. You suddenly start dressing exactly like the others. It's a way of being invisible. The way you sew the patches on the holes in your blue jeans becomes incredibly important. If you do it wrong you're not with it. That's a peculiar phrase, you know? With it. With what? Wit..
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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bf33e30
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And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was.
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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e05fb0e
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Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man's toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigid..
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sexes
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Ursula K. Le Guin |