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Imagination Quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

16 Imagination quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

All Imagination quotes Ursula K. Le Guin’s page

Le Guin’s imagination stretches across worlds and ideas, and these sixteen excerpts capture the breadth of her speculative mind. From the quiet wonder of everyday marvels to the daring leaps of mythic realms, the quotes give you a compact yet vivid sense of her storytelling compass.

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Truth is a matter of the imagination.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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There's a great fear of the imagination. It's a dangerous thing. It's out of control, it's subversive.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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“Many people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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“If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly. Little…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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“I know that I am going to meet a personal variation on reality; a partial view of reality. But I know also…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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“As the virtual world of electronic communication becomes the world many of us inhabit all the time, in turning to imaginative literature…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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More by Ursula K. Le Guin

“...I wore his blood for clothing, on my legs and thighs and hands: a dry, stiff, brown garment with no warmth in it.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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“Aeneas' mother is a star?" "No; a goddess." I said cautiously, "Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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“Meaning - this is perhaps the common note, the bane I am seeking. What is the Meaning of this book, this event in the…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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“. . . chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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“If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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“The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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“I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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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…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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“Hector had no virtue?” “Of course he did. He won all his battles, till the last one.” “We all do,” Aeneas remarked.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

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“I was willing to believe him that most modern writing was trash, on the evidence that so much old writing was trash; but I…

Ursula K. Le Guin

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“Can women operate as women in a male institution without becoming imitation men?”

Ursula K. Le Guin

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