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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 anything else
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Ursula K. Le Guin
Age: 88 †
Born: 1929
Born: October 21
Died: 2018
Died: January 22
Author
Feminist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Berkeley
California
Ursula Kroeber
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Entirely
Mysterious
Felt
Art
Translating
Else
Translation
Anything
Translations
Writing
Increasingly
Like
Translate
More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself
Ursula K. Le Guin
My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin
To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, or anything else.
Ursula K. Le Guin
We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.
Ursula K. Le Guin
All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ah, genre. A word only a Frenchman could love.
Ursula K. Le Guin
To see a candle's light, one must take it into a dark place. This is the same as to see the good and be grateful, one must compare and contrast it with something worse - not better!
Ursula K. Le Guin
I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons there was one of them just now that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.
Ursula K. Le Guin
It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in might making right power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I think what's happening is, it's all - fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever - finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.
Ursula K. Le Guin
