There's a great maze of tunnels, a Labyrinth. It's like a great dark city, under the hill. Full of gold, and the swords of old heroes, and old crowns, and bones, and years, and silence.

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 that bears it heavier.

She saw a light like a star in darkness, underground, long ago, and his face in the light.

In the room heavy with life he slept.

But we're all walking in the night, now, on ground we don't know. When the day comes we may know where we are, or we may not.

He knew once more, at last, after this long, bitter, wasted time, who he was and where he was. But where he must go in the years to come, that he could not see; and he feared to see it.

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!

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.

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...

“You told me to show you something worth seeing. I show you yourself.”

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

I'm a part of it. Not separate from it. I walk on the ground and the ground's walked on by me, I breathe the air and change it, I am entirely interconnected with the world.

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

They have no gods. They work magic, and think they are gods themselves. But they are not. And when they die, they become dust and bone, and their ghosts whine on the wind a little while till the wind blows them away. They do not have immortal souls.

Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience.

It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.

We're in the world, not against it.

This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.

We all do harm by being.

All her life she had looked into dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went out beyond the stars.

All men were alien to one another, at times.

A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.

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

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.

But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.

All her life she had looked into dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went out beyond the stars.

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 told me to show you something worth seeing. I show you yourself.”

Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it’s then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty.

What we do is assert the wholeness of time.

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

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.

A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.

Games and stories are imitations of life, ways of playing at life, sometimes ways of learning how to live. Some of the rules may appear both cruel and arbitrary. But if you want to play the game, or live the life, you have to follow them.

A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.

But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.

There is no kingdom like the forests.

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.

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

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.

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

The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

Yet we were rescued by that fancy, and saved by a myth.

To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

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.

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

We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society formed upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.

I’ll take you to Havnor and say to the princes of Earthsea, “Look! In the place of darkness I found the light, her spirit. By her an old evil was brought to nothing. By her I was brought out of the grave. By her the broken was made whole, and where there was hatred there will be peace.”

Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.