Back then, in 1967, wizards were all, more or less, Merlin and Gandalf. Old men, peaked hats, white beards. But this was to be a book for young people. Well, Merlin and Gandalf must have been young once, right? And when they were young, when they were fool kids, how did they learn to be wizards? And there was my book.
It was the idea of writing with a specific audience in mind or a specific age of reader that scared me off.
And mage and sailor are not so far apart; both work with the powers of sky and sea, and bend great winds to the uses of their hands, bringing near what was remote.
And not only narrativity but the quality of the writing is of the first importance to me. Rightly or not, I believe a dull, inept style signals poverty or incompleteness of thought. I see the accuracy, scope, and quality of Darwin’s intellect directly expressed in the clarity, strength, and vitality of his writing – the beauty of it.
Perhaps women have more complicated selves. They know how to do more than one thing at one time. That comes late to men. If at all.
Pride kept her from confiding in the other girls, and caution kept her from confessing to the older women.
If memory remains sound and the thinking mind retains its vigor, an old intelligence may have extraordinary breadth and depth of understanding.
I hate complaining to strangers – you can only complain satisfactorily to people you know really well.
Most best-sellers are written for readers who are willing to be passive consumers. The blurbs on their covers often highlight the coercive, aggressive power of the text – compulsive page-turner, gut-wrenching, jolting, mind-searing, heart-stopping – what is this, electroshock torture?
Are there really people without resentment, without hate? she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the.
Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom... and that freedom must not be compromised. It must be available to all who need it, when they need it, and that’s always.
They let us be, here, in the cage of our ignorance.
But because she was not a girl now, she was not awed, but only wondered at how men ordered their world into this dance of masks, and how easily a woman might learn to dance it.
Orr’s gods were nameless and unenvious, asking neither worship nor obedience.
We weren’t cruel, we were ignorant, foolish. Children are ignorant and foolish. But they learn. If they are given a chance to learn.
To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest.
The moment was gone; he saw it going. He did not try to hold on to it. He knew he was part of it, not it of him. He was in its keeping.
Ultimately you write alone. And ultimately you and you alone can judge your work. The judgment that a work is complete – this is what I meant to do, and I stand by it – can come only from the writer, and it can be made rightly only by a writer who’s learned to read her own work. Group criticism is great training for self-criticism. But until quite recently no writer had that training, and yet they learned what they needed. They learned it by doing it.
Indeed it can be seen as our human essence, how few behavioral imperatives we follow. How flexible we are in finding new things to do, new ways to go. How ingeniously, inventively, desperately we seek the right way, the true way, the Way we believe we lost long ago among the thickets of novelty and opportunity and choice...
What is the sense of giving a boundary to all... of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?