The more defensive a society, the more conformist.
After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
There is no kingdom like the forests.
Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.
The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.
Even in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence; and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been.
I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
To see a candle’s light one must take it into a dark place.
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.
Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.
He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.
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.
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?
Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly.
The wise needn’t ask, the fool asks in vain.
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. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.
But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.
I write with all my heart.
Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.