Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.
The heavy work requiring muscle and the skilled work with crops and sheep was done by Ged, Shandy, and Tenar, while the two old men who had been there all their lives, his father’s men took him about and told him how they managed it all, and truly believed they were managing it all, and shared their believe with him.
Words are my matter – my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood.
The tree said in its rooted being, “All my leaves are seen, but one, this one in the darkness cast by all the others. This one leaf I keep secret to myself. Who will see it in the darkness of my leaves? And who will count the number of them?
Imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
The daily hummingbird assaults existence with improbability.
The offer of a generous spirit is not one to refuse lightly.
Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes...
Making female noises, shrieking and squeaking and being shrill, all those things that annoy people with longer vocal cords. Another case where the length of organs seems to be so important to men.
We’re not outside the world... We are the world. We’re its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don’t say the words, what is their in our world?
Actually, I don’t exactly have expectations. I have hopes, and fears.
Tenar, I go where I am sent. I follow my calling. It has not yet let me stay in any land for long. Do you see that? I do what I must do. Where I go, I must go alone. So long as you need me, I’ll be with you in Havnor. And if you ever need me again, call me. I will come. I would come from my grave if you called me, Tenar! But I cannot stay with you.
In the latter months of his own long sickness the Master Herbal had taught him much of the healer’s lore, and the first lesson and the last of all that lore was this: Heal the wound and cure the illness, but let the dying spirit go.
Which of us saved the other from the Labyrinth, Ged?
You must be Arha, or you must be Tenar. You cannot be both.
Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn’t know how to sell the product.
They exist. But they are not your Masters. They never were. You are free, Tenar. You were taught to be a slave, but you have broken free.
His alarm clock ticked by the head of the bed. He gazed at its whitish face, the hands both drawing downward. There were no clocks, there. There were no hours. It was not the river of time flowing that moved the clock’s hands forward; their mechanism moved them. Seeing them move men said, Time is passing, passing, but they were fooled by the clocks they made. It is we who pass through time, Hugh thought.
And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry. Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivialises.
WE stowed the wheels, uncapped the sledge-runners, put on our sis, and took off – down, north, onward, into that silent vastness of fire an ice that said in enormous letters of black and white DEATH, DEATH, written right across a continent. The sledge pulled like a feather, and we laughed with joy.