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.

Omelas already exists: no need to build it or choose it. We already live here –in the narrow, foul, dark prison we let our ignorance, fear, and hatred build for us and keep us in, here in the splendid, beautiful city of life...

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.

Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think

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

The world’s vast and strange, Hara, but no vaster and no stranger than our minds are.

What is hard is to keep alive on a world you don't belong to.

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

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

What good is power when you're too wise to use it?

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

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.

And mage and sailor are not so far apart; both work with the powers of sky and sea, and bend great winds to the uses of their hands, bringing near what was remote.

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

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

Listen, Tenar. Heed me. You were the vessel of evil. The evil is poured out. It is done. It is buried in its own tomb. You were never made for cruelty and darkness; you were made to hold light, as a lamp burning holds and gives its light.

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

Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.

As he came to the bank Ogion, waiting, reached out his hand and clasping the boy’s arm whispered to him his true name: Ged.

it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.

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 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.

I made myself a vessel. I know its shape. But not the clay. Life danced me. I know the dances. But I don't know who the dancer is.

things change: authors and wizards are not always to be trusted: nobody can explain a dragon.

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

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.

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

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

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

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being.

Greed puts out the sun.

I come with empty hands and the desire to unbuild walls.

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.

But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.

You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.

I was in too much haste, and now have no time left.

She looked where he was looking, into the dim gulf of air above the western sea. “If she comes, she'll come from there,” he said. “And if she doesn't come, she is there.” She nodded. “I know.” Her eyes were filled with tears.

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

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.

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 was one whose power was akin to, and as strong as, the Old Powers of the earth; one who talked with dragons, and held off earthquakes with his word. And there he lay asleep on the dirt, with a little thistle growing by his hand.

Omelas already exists: no need to build it or choose it. We already live here –in the narrow, foul, dark prison we let our ignorance, fear, and hatred build for us and keep us in, here in the splendid, beautiful city of life...

Let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial.

Yet as he gazed he became aware that at last that it was no magelight, no cold glory of wizardry, that lay shadowless on every line of the man's face, but light itself: morning, the common light of day.

There is no kingdom like the forests.

Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think

To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return.

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.

For to keep dark the mind of the mageborn, that is a dangerous thing.