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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
Else
Translation
Anything
Translations
Writing
Increasingly
Like
Translate
Entirely
Mysterious
Felt
Art
Translating
More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.
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
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin
That I was not dueling with the king, but trying to communicate with him, was itself an incommunicable fact.
Ursula K. Le Guin
There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.
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
Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Sometimes I not only stand there and take it, I even smile at them and say I'm sorry. When I feel that smile coming onto my face, I wish I could take my face off and stamp on it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The backside of heroism is often rather sad women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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
Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Even in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been.
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
I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark.
Ursula K. Le Guin
We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
Ursula K. Le Guin
There is no kingdom like the forests.
Ursula K. Le Guin
By and large books are mankind's best invention.
Ursula K. Le Guin
