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.

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream.

That is between me and my shadow.

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

In this effort to attain security, independence and privacy of course were suspect...

Laws are made against the impulse a people most fears in itself. Do not kill was the Shing's vaunted single Law. All else was permitted: which meant, perhaps, there was little else they really wanted to do...

Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.

We broke the world to make it whole...

The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater this peril.

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

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

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.

And he would watch the snow falling, thin and ceaseless, on the empty lands below the window, and feel the dull cold grow within him, till it seemed no feeling was left to him except a kind of weariness.

Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it.

I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.

All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the “right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might.

“If a word can heal, a word can wound,” the witch said. “If a hand can kill, a hand can cure.”

“Life-giver,” he said and leaned forward, kissing her breast and mouth.

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it.

My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.

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.

She had not realized how very different people were, how differently they saw life. She felt as if she had looked up and suddenly seen a whole new planet hanging huge and populous right outside the window.

A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.

We broke the world to make it whole...

This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

He was not interested in detached knowledge, science for science's sake: there was no use learning anything if it was of no use. Relevance was his touchstone.

He thought, I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part.

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream.

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.

It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.

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.

But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.

Her dress was of turquoise-colored silk, bright and soft as the evening sky. It belled out full from her hips, and all the skirt was embroidered with thin silver threads and seed pearls and tiny crumbs of crystal, so that it glittered softly, like rain in April.

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

You must be Arha, or you must be Tenar. You cannot be both.

And if you ever need me again, call me. I will come. I would come from my grave if you called me, Tenar! But I cannot stay with you.

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream.

Despite what some adults seem to think, teenagers are fully human.

“Why are men afraid of women?” “If your strength is only the other's weakness, you live in fear,” Ged said. “Yes; but women seem to fear their own strength, to be afraid of themselves.” “Are they ever taught to trust themselves?” Ged asked “No,” she said.

She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.

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

We all do harm by being.

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

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

So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off.

And he would watch the snow falling, thin and ceaseless, on the empty lands below the window, and feel the dull cold grow within him, till it seemed no feeling was left to him except a kind of weariness.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners.