“I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live.”

Ged stood still a while, like one who has received great news, and must enlarge his spirit to receive it.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

The Old Powers of earth are not for men to use. They were never given into our hands, and in our hands they work only ruin. Ill means, ill end. I was not drawn here, but driven here, and the force that drove me works to my undoing.

In the latter months of his own long sickness the Master Herbal had taught him much of the healer's lore, and the first lesson and the last of all that lore was this: Heal the wound and cure the illness, but let the dying spirit go.

He seemed not to know the uses of silence.

That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?

I see life as a shared gift, received from others and passed on to others, living and dying as one process, in which lies both our suffering and our reward. Without mortality to purchase it, how can we have the consciousness of eternity? I think the price is worth paying.

To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

All or nothing, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?

She spoke if in trance, rapture. Manan watched her. His slabby face never expressed much but stolid, careful sadness; it was sadder than usual now. “Well, and you're mistress of all that,” he said. “The silence, and the dark.”

You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.

A rock is a good thing, too, you know. If the Isles of Earthsea were all made of diamond, we'd lead a hard life here. Enjoy the illusions, lad, and let the rocks be rocks.

She could not have been born gray. Her color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber.

So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

He grinned a little as he thought it; for he had always liked that pause, that fearful pause, the moment before things changed.

And in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.

Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience.

He seemed not to know the uses of silence.

That is between me and my shadow.

He grinned a little as he thought it; for he had always liked that pause, that fearful pause, the moment before things changed.

What we do is assert the wholeness of time.

She could not have been born gray. Her color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber.

The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.

I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud.

The shadow dared not follow him into a dragon’s jaws.

You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

The fire danced in her eyes. The flames swam, flared up, sank away, brightened again against the sooty stone, against the dark sky, against the pale sky, the gulfs of evening, the depths of air and light beyond the world.

Love that wants only to get, to possess, is a monstrous thing.

In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.

In the room heavy with life he slept.

A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.

All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.

There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.

All I have is dreams. And now other people run them.

If we hide, Therru, we feed him. We will eat. And we will starve him.

Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.

She never saw why something could not be. Another reason he loved her.

An irrelevant and poignant sensation of pleasure rose in him, like a tree that grew up and flowered all in one moment with its roots in his loins and its flowers in his mind.

For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.

You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes – the walls, the walls!

And after a while he saw at the faint outermost edge of the light a shadow that came towards him over the sand. At first it was shapeless, but as it drew nearer it took on the look of a man.

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose.

Go to bed; tired is stupid.