By the time I wrote this book I needed to look at heroics from outside and underneath, from the point of view of the people who are not included. The ones who can’t do magic. The ones who don’t have shining staffs or swords. Women, kids, the poor, the old, the powerless. Unheroes, ordinary people – my people. I didn’t want to change Earthsea, but I needed to see what Earthsea looked like to us.
Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios, every now and then. I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
These two issues combined – our inability to deal with our own numbers and our insistence that we are what matters most – may well be the finish of us.
Hold fast to the one noble thing.
With ceremony, with forms of politeness and reassurance, they borrowed the waters of the River and its little confluents to drink and be clean and irrigate with, using water mindfully, carefully. They lived in a land that answers greed with drought and death. A difficult land: aloof yet sensitive.
What it made me think about above all is how incredibly much we learn from our birthday to last day – from where the horsies live to the origin of the stars. How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.
To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non-existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof.
It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy me change me? Yes, that he will. There’s the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger.
The tongue they speak there is not like any spoken in the Archipelago or the other Reaches, and they are a savage people, white-skinned, yellow-haired, and fierce, liking the sight of blood and the smell of burning towns.
A voice in the darkness said, ‘You have come too far.’ Arren answered it, saying, ‘Only too far is far enough.
Then Ged pitied her. She was like a white deer caged, like a white bird wing-clipped, like a silver ring in an old man’s finger.
The question was where to start. Where to build up a solid foundation of knowledge on which you could balance ideas. It wasn’t exactly a modest ambition. But what I had learned from Natalie was that you could have a very immodest ambition if you went after it methodically.
I respect commas far more than I respect congressmen.
The racism, misogyny, and counter-rationality of the reactionary right in American politics for the last several years is a frightening exhibition of the destructive force of anger deliberately nourished by hate, encouraged to rule thought, invited to control behavior. I hope our republic survives this orgy of self-indulgent rage.
A bully doesn’t answer you; he may hear but pays no heed; he talks on as if you were of no account, and it gives him the advantage always at the start, though not always.
The world is always new,” said Coro Mena, “however old its roots.
Now, what is forbidden to the summoner, or any wizard, is to call a living spirit. We can call to them, yes. We can send to them a voice or a presentment, a seeming, of ourself. But we do not summon them, in spirit or in flesh, to come to us. Only the dead may we summon. Only the shadows. You can see why this must be. To summon a living man is to have entire power over him, body and mind. No one, no matter how strong or wise or great, can rightly own and use another.
An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or a soap-works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn’t work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscience.
They were not victors, he and his kind, not in any way, they were the defeated still, for they had become like their “betters.
But I, who am old, who have done what I must do, who stand in the daylight facing my own death, the end of all possibility, I know that there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept.