The Paris Review

Ten Things I Learned from Ursula K. Le Guin

“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.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind, 2004.

Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the first science-fiction writers I read. I was in college at the time,. Since then, I’ve heard many other readers say the same thing I felt: that book took the top of my head right off.

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