H > Recent Status Updates

“Translation is always a treason, and as a Ming author observes, can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade,—all the threads are there, but not the subtlety of colour or design.”

impossible to read a book like this and not think of the early pandemic lockdown. can’t tell if i do or don’t wish i had run across this in 2020 instead of now

“if i cannot inspire love, i will cause fear”

he just wants to he LOVED!!!

“What these incidents really make clear, my dear fellow, is that the laws evolved by one particular species, for the convenience of that species, are, by their nature, concerned only with the capacities of that species—against a species with different capacities they simply become inapplicable.”

the sheer audacity. i’m having a ball. if you’re going to commit to reality-bending as a part of the universe, you gotta commit, and boy howdy does this book do so

this book just made my jaw drop

delighted to start this and realize that the main character absolutely sucks

I guess you can’t tell a story from the point of view of something that you don’t think has a point of view.

back at it after a few weeks away. this story has been eating me alive and i need to finish it

really tired of how some men are incapable of imaging a fantasy world that doesn’t contain appalling amounts of rape

if carlo giuliani doesn’t die a horrible miserable humiliating death i will go to russell’s doorstep and start screaming

‘If you can see a thing whole,’ he said, ‘it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day life, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.’

“Anyhow, I have never written a plot-driven novel. I admire plot from a vast distance, with unenvious admiration. I don’t do it; never did it; don’t want to; can’t.”

in general i think le guin is more interested in People writ large—cultures, societies—than she is in people as individuals. this is a feature of her writing and one i greatly admire but i find myself wishing i had a bit more awareness of rocannon as a person, as a character

For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet once more as aliens. We had touched, in the only way we could touch. We left it at that. I do not know if we were right.

one of the most interesting/frustrating things about this book is that genly is lowkey misogynistic and, since every gethenian has the capacity to become a woman, he therefore disdains literally all of them

“No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other.”

read the entirety of the chapter on the universe expanding to my sister while she was working out

“A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.”

“He thinks, I never lay awake a night for love, though poets tell me that is the procedure.”

“But now our requirements have changed, and the facts have changed behind us.”

He feels a moment of jealousy toward the dead, to those who served kings in slower times than these.

Redheaded people can look quite strained when they are raising eyebrows that aren’t really there.

It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.