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Any Artist Must Expect To Work Amid The Total, Rational Indifference Of Everybody Else To Their Work, For Years, Perhaps For Life.
-Ursula K. Le Guin
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Any Artist Must Expect

Ursula K. Le Guin
...
Any Artist Must Expect To Work Amid The Total, Rational Indifference Of Everybody Else To Their Work, For Years, Perhaps For Life.

Understanding the Quote: "any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of..."

This quote by Ursula K. Le Guin reflects deeply on the theme of artist. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Artist, Years, Indifference, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Ursula K. Le Guin interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin is celebrated for insightful thoughts on artist and years. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Nothing Said In Words Ever Came Out Quite Even. Things In Words Got Twisted And Ran Together, Instead Of Staying Straight And Fitting Together.
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I Am Living In A Nightmare, From Which From Time To Time I Wake In Sleep.
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The Same Old Hypocrisy. Life Is A Fight, And The Strongest Wins. All Civilization Does Is Hide The Blood And Cover Up The Hate With Pretty Words!
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Men
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Writing
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Men
News
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Ideas
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Sea
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Roots
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Sleep
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Foolish
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Nice
Writing
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Rooms
Spirit
Makers
The Future Has Become Uninhabitable. Such Hopelessness Can Arise, I Think, Only From An Inability To Face The Present, To Live In The Present, To Live As A Responsible Being Among Other Beings In This Sacred World Here And Now, Which Is All We Have, And All We Need, To Found Our Hope Upon.
Future
Thinking
Sacred
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Airports
People
Soul
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Forever
Knows
Saying That, He Was Suddenly Himself Again, Despite His Lunatic Hair And Eyes: A Man Whose Personal Dignity Went So Deep As To Be Nearly Invisible... It Was More Than Diginity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like A Block Of Wood Not Carved. The Infinite Possibility, The Unlimited And Unqualified Wholeness Of Being Of The Uncommitted, The Nonacting, The Uncarved: The Being Who, Being Nothing But Himself, Is Everything.
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Integrity
Eye
We Sleep Researchers Like Cats, You Know; They Sleep A Lot!
Sleep
Cat
Researchers
A Story Rises From The Springs Of Creation, From The Pure Will To Be; It Tells Itself; I Takes Its Own Course, Finds Its Own Way, Its Own Words; And The Writer's Job Is To Be Its Medium.
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Spring
Writing
In So Far As One Denies What Is, One Is Possessed By What Is Not, The Compulsions, The Fantasies, The Terrors That Flock To Fill The Void.
Rejection
Void
Fantasy
A Child Free From The Guilt Of Ownership And The Burden Of Economic Competition Will Grow Up With The Will To Do What Needs Doing And The Capacity For Joy In Doing It. It Is Useless Work That Darkens The Heart. The Delight Of The Nursing Mother, Of The Scholar, Of The Successful Hunter, Of The Good Cook, Of The Skilful Maker, Of Anyone Doing Needed Work And Doing It Well, - This Durable Joy Is Perhaps The Deepest Source Of Human Affection And Of Sociality As A Whole.
Mother
Children
Growing Up
There's No Way To Use Power For Good.
Use
Way
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Drama
Doors
Perception
I Don't Want To Be A Propagandist, No Matter How Good The Cause. I Want To Tell Stories. It's Just That The Stories Have To Square With My Consciousness As A Woman And My Conscience As A Human Being.
Squares
Stories
Want
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.
Sea
Doe
Want
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Marketing
Exclusion
All Of Us Have To Learn How To Invent Our Lives , Make Them Up, Imagine Them. We Need To Be Taught These Skills; We Need Guides To Show Us How. If We Don't, Our Lives Get Made Up For Us By Other People .
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People
Taught
The Book Itself Is A Curious Artifact, Not Showy In Its Technology But Complex And Extremely Efficient: A Really Neat Little Device, Compact, Often Very Pleasant To Look At And Handle, That Can Last Decades, Even Centuries. It Doesn't Have To Be Plugged In, Activated, Or Performed By A Machine; All It Needs Is Light, A Human Eye, And A Human Mind. It Is Not One Of A Kind, And It Is Not Ephemeral. It Lasts. It Is Reliable.
Book
Eye
Technology
The Earth Is Beautiful, And Bright, And Kindly, But That Is Not All. The Earth Is Also Terrible, And Dark, And Cruel. The Rabbit Shrieks Dying In The Green Meadows. The Mountains Clench Their Great Hands Full Of Hidden Fire. There Are Sharks In The Sea, And There Is Cruelty In Men's Eyes.
Beautiful
Eye
Dark
Even A Poet Cannot Get Everything Right.
Poet
The Light Is The Left Hand Of Darkness.
Light
Hands
Darkness
To Have A Choice At All Is To Be Privileged.
Choices
Privileged
The One Thing A Writer Has To Have Is A Pencil And Some Paper. That's Enough, So Long As She Knows That She And She Alone Is In Charge Of That Pencil, And Responsible, She And She Alone, For What It Writes On That Paper.
Writing
Long
Paper
By Such Literalism, Fundamentalism, Religions Betrayed The Best Intentions Of Their Founders. Reducing Thought To Formula, Replacing Choice By Obedience, These Preachers Turned The Living Word Into Dead Law.
Law
Choices
Betrayed
A Forest Ecology Is A Delicate One. If The Forest Perishes, Its Fauna May Go With It. The Athshean Word For World Is Also The Word For Forest.
May
Forests
World
Certainly The Effort To Remain Unchanged, Young, When The Body Gives So Impressive A Signal Of Change As The Menopause, Is Gallant; But It Is A Stupid, Self-sacrificial Gallantry, Better Befitting A Boy Of Twenty Than A Woman Of Forty-five Or Fifty. Let The Athletes Die Young And Laurel-crowned. Let The Soldiers Earn The Purple Hearts. Let Women Die Old, White-crowned, With Human Hearts.
Stupid
Athlete
Heart
There Are Things That Outweigh Comfort, Unless One Is An Old Woman Or A Cat.
Cat
Comfort
Old Woman
Gradually The Healing Took Place, Seeming As It Always Does That It Wasn't Taking Place.
Healing
Doe
Seeming
What Is Life Without Incompatible Realities?
Reality
What Is Life
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.
Happiness
Pain
Stupid
One Of The Things [fiction] Does Is Lead You To Recognize What You Did Not Know Before.
Doe
Fiction
Knows
What The Brain Does By Itself Is Infinitely More Fascinating And Complex Than Any Response It Can Make To Chemical Stimulation.
Brain
Doe
Chemicals
... The Habit Of Literature [is] The Best Defense Against Believing The Half-truths Of Ideologues And The Lies Of Demagogues.
Lying
Believe
Defense
A Wrong That Cannot Be Repaired Must Be Transcended.
By And Large Books Are Mankind's Best Invention.
Book
Invention
Mankind
When He Found That The Administrators Were Upset, He Laughed. “do They Expect Students Not To Be Anarchists?” He Said. “what Else Can The Young Be? When You Are On The Bottom, You Must Organize From The Bottom Up
Upset
Students
Anarchist
All Or Nothing At All, The True Lover Says, And That's The Truth Of It. My Love Will Never Die, He Says. He Claims Eternity. And Rightly. How Can It Die When It's Life Itself? What Do We Know Of Eternity But The Glimpse We Get Of It When We Enter In That Bond?
Life
Glimpse
Lovers
I Hope You Are Never Victims, But I Hope You Have No Power Over Other People.
People
Victim
Power Over Others
We Live In Capitalism. Its Power Seems Inescapable. So Did The Divine Right Of Kings.
Kings
Divine Right
Capitalism
Genre Fiction Was Looked At As A Ghetto, But I Wonder Now If Realist Fiction, Sealing Itself Off In The Glum Suburbs Of A Dysfunctional Society, Denying The Use Of Imagination, Was The Ghetto.
Ghetto
Imagination
Fiction
There's A Point, Around The Age Of Twenty, When You Have To Choose Whether To Be Like Everybody Else The Rest Of Your Life, Or To Make A Virtue Of Your Peculiarities.
Age
Twenties
Rest Of Your Life
We Read Books To Find Out Who We Are.
Book
Discovery
Self Understanding
Manipulated, One Manipulates Others.
Manipulate
How Can People Be Anything But Ignorant When Knowledge Isn't Saved, Isn't Taught?
People
Ignorant
Taught
I Doubt That The Imagination Can Be Suppressed. If You Truly Eradicated It In A Child, He Would Grow Up To Be An Eggplant.
Children
Growing Up
Eggplant
Predictions Are Uttered By Prophets (free Of Charge); By Clairvoyants (who Usually Charge A Fee, And Are Therefore More Honored In Their Day Than Prophets); And By Futurologists (salaried). Prediction Is The Business Of Prophets, Clairvoyants, And Futurologists. It Is Not The Business Of Novelists. A Novelist's Business Is Lying.
Lying
Novelists
Prophet
First Sentences Are Doors To Worlds.
Doors
World
Firsts
Before The Moon I Am, What A Woman Is, A Woman Of Power, A Woman's Power, Deeper Than The Roots Of Trees, Deeper Than The Roots Of Islands, Older Than The Making, Older Than The Moon.
Women
Moon
Islands
It Is A Real Wilderness, And Those Who Go There Should Not Feel Too Safe.
Real
Safe
Wilderness
The Use Of Imaginative Fiction Is To Deepen Your Understanding Of Your World, And Your Fellow Men, And Your Own Feelings, And Your Destiny.
Destiny
Men
Empathy
It's The Self That Suffers, And There's A Place Where The Self--ceases. I Don't Know How To Say It. But I Believe That The Reality--the Truth That I Recognize In Suffering As I Don't In Comfort And Happiness--that The Reality Of Pain Is Not Pain. If You Can Get Through It. If You Can Endure It All The Way.
Pain
Believe
Reality
If Civilization Has An Opposite, It Is War. Of These Two Things, You Have Either One, Or The Other. Not Both.
War
Opposites
Civilization
There Was A Wall. It Did Not Look Important. It Was Built Of Uncut Rocks Roughly Mortared. An Adult Could Look Right Over It, And Even A Child Could Climb It. Where It Crossed The Roadway, Instead Of Having A Gate It Degenerated Into Mere Geometry, A Line, An Idea Of Boundary. But The Idea Was Real. It Was Important. For Seven Generations There Had Been Nothing In The World More Important Than That Wall. Like All Walls It Was Ambiguous, Two-faced. What Was Inside It And What Was Outside It Depended Upon Which Side Of It You Were On.
Children
Wall
Real
In That Moment Ged Understood The Singing Of The Bird, And The Language Of The Water Falling In The Basin Of The Fountain, And The Shape Of The Clouds, And The Beginning And End Of The Wind That Stirred The Leaves; It Seemed To Him That He Himself Was A Word Spoken By The Sunlight.
Fall
Clouds
Wind
Sometimes One's Very Angry And Preaches, But I Know That To Clinch A Point Is To Close It. To Leave The Reader Free To Decide What Your Work Means, That's The Real Art; It Makes The Work Inexhaustible.
Art
Real
Mean
Every Book Purchase Made From Amazon Is A Vote For A Culture Without Content And Without Contentment.
Book
Contentment
Amazon
The Law Of Evolution Is That The Strongest Survives.
Law
Evolution
Strongest
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?
War
House
Cooking
Now Perhaps An Excessive Dread Of Overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects Not An Outward Reality, But An Inward State Of Mind. If You Feel Overcrowded When You're Not, What Does That Mean? Maybe That You're Afraid Of Human Contact--of Being Close To People, Of Being Touched.
Mean
Reality
People
I Do Not Care What Comes After; I Have Seen The Dragons On The Wind Of Morning.
Morning
Dragons
Wind
A Writer Is A Person Who Cares What Words Mean, What They Say, How They Say It. Writers Know Words Are Their Way Towards Truth And Freedom, And So They Use Them With Care, With Thought, With Fear, With Delight. By Using Words Well They Strengthen Their Souls. Story-tellers And Poets Spend Their Lives Learning That Skill And Art Of Using Words Well. And Their Words Make The Souls Of Their Readers Stronger, Brighter, Deeper.
Art
Writing
Mean
If You Deny Any Affinity With Another Person Or Kind Of Person, If You Declare It To Be Wholly Different From Yourself - As Men Have Done To Women, And Class Has Done To Class, And Nation Has Done To Nation - You May Hate It Or Deify It; But In Either Case You Have Denied Its Spiritual Equality And Its Human Reality. You Have Made It Into A Thing, To Which The Only Possible Relationship Is A Power Relationship. And Thus You Have Fatally Impoverished Your Own Reality.
Spiritual
Respect
Hate
Art Is Craft: All Art Is Always And Essentially A Work Of Craft: But In The True Work Of Art, Before The Craft And After It, Is Some Essential Durable Core Of Being, Which Is What The Craft Works On, And Shows, And Sets Free. The Statue In The Stone. How Does The Artist Find That, See It, Before It's Visible? That Is A Real Question.
Art
Real
Essentials
Nothing Is Yours. It Is To Use. It Is To Share. If You Will Not Share It, You Cannot Use It.
Use
Share
Ifs
Stories Are What Death Thinks He Puts An End To. He Can't Understand That They End In Him, But They Don't End With Him.
Thinking
Stories
Ends
Civilized Man Says: I Am Self, I Am Master, All The Rest Is Other--outside, Below, Underneath, Subservient. I Own, I Use, I Explore, I Exploit, I Control. What I Do Is What Matters. What I Want Is What Matter Is For. I Am That I Am, And The Rest Is Women & Wilderness, To Be Used As I See Fit.
Men
What Matters
Self
It Is Yin And Yang. Light Is The Left Hand Of Darkness ... How Did It Go? Light, Dark. Fear, Courage. Cold, Warmth. Female, Male. It Is Yourself ... Both And One. A Shadow On Snow.
Dark
Light
Hands
He Knew Now, And The Knowledge Was Hard, That His Task Had Never Been To Undo What He Had Done, But To Finish What He Had Begun.
Tasks
Done
Hard
True Understanding Is The Spur Of Genius
Understanding
Mentor
Spurs
If I Had To Pick A Hero, It Would Be Charles Darwin--the Size Of His Mind, Which Included All That Scientific Curiosity And Knowledge Seeking, And The Ability To Put It All Together. There Is A Genuine Spirituality About Darwin's Thinking.
Hero
Thinking
Curiosity
There Have Been Great Societies That Did Not Use The Wheel, But There Have Been No Societies That Did Not Tell Stories.
Writing
Library
Stories
The More Defensive A Society, The More Conformist.
Conformist
The Thing About Working With Time, Instead Of Against It, He Thought, Is That It Is Not Wasted. Even Pain Counts.
Pain
Anyhow They’re Always Exceptions. But Most Women, Their Only Relationship To A Man Is Having. Either Owning Or Being Owned.
Men
Exception
Honestly, Orthodoxy Concerns Me About As Much As It Concerns Your Average Jackrabbit. I Only Follow Rules That Take Me Where I Want To Go. If There Aren't Any Rules, I Make Up My Own And Follow Them Strictly.
Average
Want
Orthodoxy
A Writer Is A Person Who Cares What Words Mean, What They Say, How They Say It... By Using Words Well They Strengthen Their Souls.
Mean
Soul
Who Cares
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.
People
Trying
Way
Her Concern With Landscapes And Living Creatures Was Passionate. This Concern, Feebly Called, "the Love Of Nature" Seemed To Shevek To Be Something Much Broader Than Love. 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. It Was Strange To See Takver Take A Leaf Into Her Hand, Or Even A Rock. She Became An Extension Of It, It Of Her.
Cutting
Rocks
Hands
Things Don't Have Purposes, As If The Universe Were A Machine, Where Every Part Has A Useful Function. What's The Function Of A Galaxy? I Don't Know If Our Life Has A Purpose And I Don't See That It Matters. What Does Matter Is That We're A Part. Like A Thread In A Cloth Or A Grass-blade In A Field. It Is And We Are. What We Do Is Like Wind Blowing On The Grass.
Wind Blowing
Matter
Fields
Almost Everything Is Double Like That For Adolescents; Their Lies Are True And Their Truths Are Lies, And Their Hearts Are Broken By The World. They Gyre And Fall; They See Through Everything, And Are Blind.
Lying
Fall
Heart
To Think That Realistic Fiction Is By Definition Superior To Imaginative Fiction Is To Think Imitation Is Superior To Invention.
Thinking
Fiction
Definitions
While We Read A Novel, We Are Insane—bonkers. We Believe In The Existence Of People Who Aren't There, We Hear Their Voices... Sanity Returns (in Most Cases) When The Book Is Closed.
Believe
Book
Voice
Trending Author
George Galloway
Gloria Macapagal Arroyo
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Category
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