They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?
The poet Roethke said, “I learn by going where I have to go.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
A lot of snow out of one cloud, and it grows thicker.
An early visitor described a Veksi village as “five big houses full of women swearing at each other and fourteen little houses full of men sulking.
If piano is the opposite of forte, graceful chitchat with strangers is definitely my piano.
I know perfectly well he’s a god, too. But what I think is he’ll be much godlier after he’s dead.
But I know him, Moss. It’s Sparrowhawk.” Saying the name, Ged’s use-name, released a tenderness in her, so that for the first time she thought and felt that this was he indeed, and that all the years since she had first seen him were their bond. She saw a light like a star in darkness, underground, long ago, and his face in the light.
Oh Lavinia, Lavinia, you are worth ten Camillas. And I never saw it.
Cured?” Goss said. “Would you cure a singer of his voice?
Through him speaks a shrewd and magnanimous people, a people who have woven together into one wisdom a profound, old, terrible, and unimaginably various experience of life. But he himself is young: impatient, inexperienced. He stands higher than we stand, seeing wider, but he is himself only the height of a man.
I asked if these two psychopaths could not be cured. “Cured?” Goss said. “Would you cure a singer of his voice?
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. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her.
A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One’s freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one’s own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other.
The story is the way the story is told.
I remember Aeneas’ words as I remember the poet’s words. I remember every word because they are the fabric of my life, the warp I am woven on. All my life since Aeneas’ death might seem a weaving torn out of the loom unfinished, a shapeless tangle of threads making nothing, but it is not so; for my mind returns as the shuttle returns always to the starting place, finding the pattern, going on with it. I was a spinner, not a weaver, but I have learned to weave.
In the big, crowded, noisy room where golden suns swam on the walls and the years and Years were told on golden dials, he searched for the alien, the stranger, his wife.
It goes right back to the idea of the Power of Positive Thinking, which is so strong in America because it fits in so well with the Power of Commercial Advertising and with the Power of Wishful Thinking, aka the American Dream.
The notion that fantasy is only for the immature rises from an obstinate misunderstanding of both maturity and the imagination.
Ultimately you write alone.