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Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes about Pain

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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:

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.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Happiness, Pain, Stupid
"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas". Book by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1973.

No society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Pain, Reality, Roots

This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Pain, Artist, Evil
Ursula K. Le Guin (2016). “The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin”, p.291, Simon and Schuster

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.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Pain, Believe, Reality

Love's just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don't have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Pain, Choices, Missing

The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Pain
Ursula K. LeGuin (2015). “The Dispossessed”, p.144, Hachette UK

And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Pain, Dark, Men
Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “A Wizard of Earthsea”, p.214, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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