What is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry?
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
To light a candle is to cast a shadow . . .
When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed.
His alarm clock ticked by the head of the bed. He gazed at its whitish face, the hands both drawing downward. There were no clocks, there. There were no hours. It was not the river of time flowing tha...
Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, wit...
Do you see how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand th...
'Banished men should never speak their native tongue; it comes bitter from their mouth. And this language suits a traitor better, I think; drips off one's teeth like sugar-syrup.'
I know that I am going to meet a personal variation on reality; a partial view of reality. But I know also that by that partiality, that distancing from the shared experience, it will be new: a revela...
If women had power, what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?...I mean, men give her [a queen] power. They let her use their power. But it isn't her...
[Arren] was proud of his lineage, but thought of himself as an heir of princes, one of the House of Enlad. Morred, from whom that house descended, had been dead two thousand years. His deeds were matt...
I know perfectly well he's a god, too. But what I think is he'll be much godlier after he's dead.
On the sea he wished to meet it, if meet it he must. He was not sure why this was, yet he had a terror of meeting the thing again on dry land. Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evi...
Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than...
So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.
As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wiz...
To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place.
I saw that you can’t do anything for anybody. We can’t save each other. Or ourselves.What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You’re denying brotherhood, Shevek! the tall girl cried.No—no, I’m...