Ursula K. Le Guin

A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.

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

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.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty, not knowing what comes next.

You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.

If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, 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.
- All from Ursula K. Le Guin

About: Ursula Kroeber was born at Berkeley, California on 21Oct in 1929. She earned her BA at Radcliffe College in 1951 and her Masters at Columbia the next year. While most of her writing features bizarre aliens in distinctly alien environments, she is a model of personal stability - she married Charles Le Guin in 1951 and they are still together, in fact they've lived in the same house in Portland, Oregon since 1958. She has written seventeen novels, eleven children's books, more than 100 short stories, two collections of essays, five volumes of poetry, apparently unaffected by the rejection notice from Astounding Science Fiction for her first story - at age eleven.