is it yours, or is it mine? i think about it almost all the time

signifier

<n>Il Dolore</n> (1879), a marble sculpture by artist <n>Emilio Gallori</n>.

<n>Crab Vessel with Double Spout</n>, a ceramic vessel from Colombia's <n>Ilama</n> period (1500 B.C.–A.D. 100).

“All the wrong that men can do is done. Justice, mercy, does Mars care for them?”

*(Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin)*

“I’m well enough. I’m very well. I have been granted what few poets are granted. Maybe it’s because I haven’t finished the poem. So I can still live in it. Even while I die I can live in it. And you, you can live in it, be here—be here to talk to me, even if I can’t write.”

*(Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin)*

“It is of great importance to him that he speak truth as nearly as he can, and since it is always hard to speak truly of things in the past, he thinks about it a while before he speaks.”

*(Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin)*

<n>Vivienne Rohner</n> for the editorial "<n>Venetian Veil</n>" in Venice. Photo by <n>Ed Martin</n>.

“And the powers of the hills and wilderness wait to curse the man who dares approach us. For Mars must stay below us here, Mars must keep down at the fields’ edge and the forests’ edge, standing on his boundaries. The heights and the wild forests are ours, ours alone, for our worship and our revels.”

*(Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin)*

Pilgrim's Badge with Sun with human face | French | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

“I am not the feminine voice you may have expected. Resentment is not what drives me to write my story. Anger, in part, perhaps. But not an easy anger. I long for justice, but I do not know what justice is. It is hard to be betrayed. It is harder to know you made betrayal inevitable.”

*(Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin)*

“When the poet sang me the fall of Troy, his story told of the king’s daughter Cassandra, who foresaw what would happen and tried to prevent the Trojans from letting the great horse into the city, but no one would listen to her: it was a curse laid on her, to see the truth and say it and not be heard. It is a curse laid on women more often than on men. Men want the truth to be theirs, their discovery and property.”

*(Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin)*

“I was a spinner, not a weaver, but I have learned to weave.”

*(Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin)*

“But then I think no, it has nothing to do with being dead, it’s not death that allows us to understand one another, but poetry.”

*(Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin)*

“Go on, go. In our tongue it is a single sound, i. I am the one to go, to go on. Go where?

I do not know. I hear him say it, and I go. On, away. On the way. The way to go. When I stop I hear him say it, his voice, Go on.”

*(Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin)*

“The nod of a head is such a small thing, it can mean so little, yet it is the gesture of assent that allows, that makes to be. The nod is the gesture of power, the yes. The numen, the presence of the sacred, is called by its name.”

*(Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin)*

“All the same, sometimes I believe I must be long dead, and am telling this story in some part of the underworld that we didn’t know about—a deceiving place where we think we’re alive, where we think we’re growing old and remembering what happened when we were young, when the bees swarmed and my hair caught fire, when the Trojans came.”

*(Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin)*

“And he does not question my certainty. He accepts that I know some things that I could not, in the ordinary way, know. He does not ask how I know.”

*(Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin)*

A <n>Head of a kouros</n> from the Greek Archaic Period, photographed by <n>Egon Van Herreweghe</n>.

A marble <n>statue of an Amazon</n> with original paint, found in Herculaneum before 79 AD.

A late 19th-century photograph of the <n>Baths of Caracalla</n> in Rome, via the <n>Granger Collection</n>.

The <n>Capitoline Venus</n>, a Roman copy of a lost sculpture by <n>Praxiteles</n> from the 4th century BC.

The graphic for the <n>Profiles t-shirt</n> by <n>Bask in the Sun</n>.

“No doubt someone with my name did exist, but she may have been so different from my own idea of myself, or my poet’s idea of me, that it only confuses me to think about her. As far as I know, it was my poet who gave me any reality at all… It was he who brought me to life, to myself, and so made me able to remember my life and myself, which I do, vividly, with all kinds of emotions, emotions I feel strongly as I write, perhaps because the events I remember only come to exist as I write them, or as he wrote them.”

*(Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin)*

“An oracle has spoken. A promise has been given. If you defy the voice that guides us, if you break the treaty I made, you do wrong.
That is all I can say to you. If you are determined to lead our people into this guilt, I cannot stop you. I can only say that you rob me of the harbor of peace I hoped for in my last years, the righteous death I longed for.”

*(Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin)*

A <n>Phoenician</n> <n>cosmetic vessel</n> carved from a Tridacna shell, c. 700-650 BC.

<n>Ca'n Terra House</n> in Menorca by <n>Ensamble Studio</n>. Photo by <n>Iwan Baan</n>.