“No harmony endures,” said the young king. “None has ever been achieved,” said the Plenipotentiary. “The pleasure is in trying.”

But you cannot charm the foam calling it sukien; you must use its own true name in the Old Speech, which is essa.

Rules are made to be broken. Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.

The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

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

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.

“No harmony endures,” said the young king. “None has ever been achieved,” said the Plenipotentiary. “The pleasure is in trying.”

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.

To enter with heart and mind into the world of the imagination may be to head deliberately and directly toward, or back toward, engagement with the real world.

Women were likely, as women, to take the next generation’s part, not this one’s; they wove the links men saw as chains, the bonds men saw as bondage.

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

You were moved to do this by pride and by hate. Is it any wonder the result was ruin?

And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet I would remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.

The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.

It was a cold that got into the bone, into the marrow, and would not be dislodged.

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.

This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.

What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?

Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, no running of river or spring, in the dark land where once Ged had gone. Death is the dry place.

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?

The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they're not evil. They're beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it. We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We're yoked, and they're free.

“You have knowledge, and I have skill, and between us we have...” “We have the Ring of Erreth-Akbe.” “Yes, that. But I thought also of another thing between us. Call it trust...”

They are beasts as we are beasts. Men are animals that speak.

Pride kept her from confiding in the other girls, and caution kept her from confessing to the older women.

To enter with heart and mind into the world of the imagination may be to head deliberately and directly toward, or back toward, engagement with the real world.

Rules are made to be broken. Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.

We all do harm by being.

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.

There is a certain bleakness in finding hope where one expected certainty.

She found that their company revived her, carried her away from the constant presence of last night's terror, little by little, till she could begin to look back on it as something that had happened, not something that was happening, that must always be happening to her.

I spoke your true name. It's not what I thought it would be. And I don't feel easy about it. As if I'd left something unfinished. But it is your name. If it betrays you, then that's the truth of it.

It was a cold that got into the bone, into the marrow, and would not be dislodged.

He liked the way she began her fierce, scornful sentences so often with a weak, conciliatory 'well.' She cut the ground out from under them before they ever got going, let them hang unsupported in the void. She had courage, great courage.

We're in the world, not against it.

The sun itself was hidden, but there was a glitter on the horizon, almost like the dazzle of the crystal walls of the Undertomb, a kind of joyous shimmering off on the edge of the world. “What is that?” the girl said, and he: “The sea.”

Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.

Falcon-winged, falcon-mad, like an unfalling arrow, like an unforgotten thought.

Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

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

Her boredom rose so strong in her sometimes that it felt like terror: it took her by the throat. Not long ago she had been driven to speak of it. She had to talk, she thought, or she would go mad.

Down the orchard aisles, in the thick, new, wet grass, the little girl ran for the joy of running.

Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.

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

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.

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

But when a direction is chosen freely and followed wholeheartedly, it may seem that all things further the going.

Because to me, fantasy isn’t wishful thinking, but a way of reflecting, and reflecting on reality.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.