My birthday auto-gift will arrive a bit later this year 🥰
The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin – The Map Room
https://www.maproomblog.com/2025/08/the-word-for-world-the-maps-of-ursula-k-le-guin/
'Language is “for” communicating, but when we come to such phenomena as #poetry and made-up names and languages, the function of communication and the construction of meaning become as impenetrable to intellect alone as the tune of a song. The writer has to listen. The reader has to hear. Pleasure in articulate sound, and in the symbolic use of it, is what moves the maker of a poem, and also the maker of a fictional language, even if her tongue is the only one that will ever speak it and her ear alone is tuned to it.'
- #UrsulaKLeGuin, Inventing #Languages (2014) #conlang #music
"If I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents through the pregnancy, birth, and infancy, till I could get some kind of work and gain some kind of independence for myself and the child, if I had done all that, which is what the anti- #abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, for the anti-abortion people, the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have borne a child for them, their child.
"But I would not have borne my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. . . . my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. I beg you to see what it is that we must save, and not to let the bigots and misogynists take it away from us again. Save what we won: our children. You who are young, before it’s too late, save your children."
- #UrsulaKLeGuin, What It Was Like: A talk given at a meeting of Oregon NARAL in January 2004 #ProChoice #feminism