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 GUINI don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
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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.
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Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.
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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.
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We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
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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.
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As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
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Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
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We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.
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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.
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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
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I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
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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.
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Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.
URSULA K. LE GUIN






