And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth.
For the kindest of them was as far out of touch, as unreachable, as the crudest.
Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience.
Heathen” is merely a word for somebody who knows a different sacredness than you know.
We’re a rough people, born of oak, as they say, here in the western land; tempers run high, weapons are always at hand.
There seems to be a firewall in my mind against ideas expressed in numbers and graphs rather than words, or in abstract words such as Sin or Creativity. I just don’t understand. And incomprehension is boredom.
I don’t know. I love the idea of democracy, the hope, yes, I love that. I couldn’t live without that. But the country? You mean the thing on the map, lines, everything inside the lines is good and nothing outside them matters? How can an adult love such a childish idea?
She was the woman in the table.
The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved; the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.
We live well in the houses, well enough, but we are ruled utterly by fear. There was a time we sailed in ships between the stars. Now, we dare not go 100 miles from home. We keep a little knowledge and do nothing with it, but once we used that knowledge to weave the pattern of life like a tapestry across night and chaos. We enlarged the chances of life.
And she told me the same thing, she said that when I came back in the winter, she was going to miss missing me...
What can I recommend? Trust your story; trust yourself; trust your readers – but wisely. Trust watchfully, not blindly. Trust flexibly, not rigidly. The whole thing, writing a story, is a high-wire act – there you are out in midair walking on a spiderweb line of words, and down in the darkness people are watching. What can you trust but your sense of balance?
Never fear. It is much easier for men to act than to refrain from acting. We will continue to do good and to do evil. But if there were a king over us all again and he sought the counsel of a mage, as in the days of old, and I were that mage, I would say to him: My lord, do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.
I wrote an essay about the rhythm of Tolkien’s writing in The Lord of the Rings. Short rhythms repeated form long rhythms; there’s a cyclical repetition in his work which I think is part of why it totally enchants so many of us. We are caught in this rhythm and are happy there.
To go under a river: there’s a strange thing to do, a really weird idea.
Life in the auntring, or for a settled man, is repetitive, as I said; and so it can be dull. Nothing new happens. The mind always wants new happenings.
You go to the Place of the Lie to find out the truth?
The wind and light on rock top hill and his voice and the rest, all the rest. All the days and lights and winds and years that would have been and that would not be. That should be and were not because he was dead. Shot dead on the road in the wind at 21. His mountains unclimbed, never to be climbed.
Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren’t. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old.
We’re a lot of newcomers, see, for my Lord Meshe was born 2,202 years ago, but the Old Way of the Handdara goes back ten thousand years before that. You have to go back to the Old Land if you’re after the Old Way. Now look here, Mr. Ai, I’ll have a room in this island for you whenever you come back, but I believe you’re a wise man to be going out of Erhenrang for a while, for everybody knows that the Traitor made a great show of befriending you at the Palace.