I use your love as a man burns a candle, burns it away, to light his steps.
Nothing is boring if you are aware of it. It may be irritating, but it is not boring. If it is pleasant the pleasure will not fail so long as you are aware of it. Being aware is the hardest work the soul can do, I think.
Under his feet he felt the hillroots going down and down into the dark, and over his head he saw the dry, far fires of the stars. Between, all things were his to order, to command. He stood at the center of the world.
The child stared at her or at nothing, trying to breathe, and trying again to breathe, and trying again to breathe.
Who am I?” Laia muttered to her invisible audience, and they knew the answer and told it to her with one voice. She was the little girl with scabby knees, sitting on the doorstep staring down through the dirty golden haze of River Street in the heat of late summer, the six-year-old, the sixteen-year-old, the fierce, cross, dream-ridden girl, untouched, untouchable. She was herself.
Having replaced instinct with language, society, and culture, we are the only species that depends on teaching and learning. We aren’t human without them. In them is true power. But are they the occupations of the rich and mighty?
He welcomed isolation with all his heart. It never occurred to him that the reserve he met in Bedap and Tirin might be a response; that his gentle but already formidable hermetic character might form its own ambiance, which only great strength, or great devotion, could withstand. All he noticed, really, was that he had plenty of time to work at last.
If there are frontiers between the civilised and the barbaric, between the meaningful and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the earth. They are boundaries of the mind alone.
A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you.
No normal human being who had experienced time-slippage of even a few decades between League worlds would volunteer for a round trip of centuries. The Surveyors were escapists, misfits. They were nuts. Ten.
THINKING about Homer, and it occurred to me that his two books are the two basic fantasy stories: the War and the Journey.
To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest.
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.
I think most old people know that, and many of us try to keep our thinking on the positive side as a matter of self-preservation, as well as dignity, the wish not to end with a prolonged whimper.
The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.
The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful the life is, is from the vantage point of death.
All fiction has ethical, political, and social weight, and sometimes the works that weigh the heaviest are those apparently fluffy or escapist fictions whose authors declare themselves “above politics,” “just entertainers,” and so on.
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.
I’ll die, you’ll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun’s going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?
An owl is mostly air.