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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

Every group we belong to – by gender, sex, race, religion, age – is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Age Future Gender Group Humanity Immense Next People Race Religion Surrounded World
Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Back Large Once Pattern See Sen Whole
Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Fantasy Height Realistic Reality Surrealistic Traditional
Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Darkness Death Hand Join Left Life Light Lover Lying Right Together Two
I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Back Choice Give Lost Thing Waste World
as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Bought Free Freedom Fresh Loneliness Solitude Writer
Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Know Language Lie Misuse Need Remember Round
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Bad Consider Encouragement Habit Happiness Pedant Sophisticate Stupid Trouble
We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Adapt Appetite Control Destroy Fast Ourselves Violence World
To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Choose Privilege
f we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we’ll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Begin Feminine Morality Road Somewhere Survival Yoke
We read books to find out who we are.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Book Find Out Read
The creative adult is the child who has survived.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Child Creative Adult Survive
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

End Justice Mean never
I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Come Hard Large Poet Realistic Reality Think Time Visionaries Writer
I 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.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Different Fiction Good Kind Name Science Think Write
Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Country Dark Earth Root
I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Back Forgotten Give Light Much World
I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Evil Hard Hole Soul Take Unconsisting
The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, – this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Affection Anyone Deep Delight Hunter Meed Mother Nurse Socialist Source Successful Whole
The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Find never One Put Wall Way Wost
What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Destroy Goes Itself Long Too Unchanged
We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Change Grandmother Matter Moon Mother Virgin Wife
Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Anybody Anything Hardly Introvert Rule Write
Success is somebody else’s failure.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Else Failure Somebody Success
If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Chance Come Evade Fulfill Home Joy May Pleasure Suffer
We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.
URSULA K. LE GUIN

Freedom Imagine Injustice Knew Live

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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