What is evil?” asked the younger man. The round web, with its black center, seemed to watch them both. “A web we men weave.” Ged answered.
The novelist’s business is lying.
Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.
Which is better off, a lizard basking in the sun or a philosopher?
Not all roads that lead down lead up as well.
Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes either depressing or carcinogenic.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow, including good-natured men.
When all ways are lost the way is clear.
If you can’t lick’em, join’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.
The life of every man is in the Center of Time, for all were seen in the seeing of Meshe, and are in his eye. We are the pupils of his Eye... Our doing is his Seeing: our being is his Knowing.
The social function of narrative is not limited to ‘primitive’ people sitting around the fire telling each other where Fire came from and why they’re sitting around it.
Like all walls it was ambiguous, two faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side you were on.
That is between me and my shadow.
Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.
The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell.
We make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build up the world with it. Babies do it, we all do it; we filter out most of what our senses report.
If we hide, Therru, we feed him. We will eat. And we will starve him. Come with me.
Boris Pasternak said that poetry makes itself from the relationship between the sounds and the meanings of words.