Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your mind, to buy safety?
Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics. The hell with The Great American Novel. We have all the great novels we need right now – and right now some man or woman is writing a new one we won’t know we needed till we read it.
Ged stood sick and haggard. He said at last, “Better I had died.” “Who are you to judge that, you for whom Nemmerle gave his life? – You are safe here. You will live here, and go on with your training. They tell me you were clever. Go on and do your work. Do it well. It is all you can do.
In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order.
Opinion all too often leaves no room for anything but itself.
In diversity is life and where there’s life there’s hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest one to be sure.
For to keep dark the mind of the mageborn, that is a dangerous thing.
A wizard’s power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow...
No, brother, I’m sane. What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain- you said that! But it’s the lies, the evasions of reality, that drive you crazy. It’s the lies that make you want to kill yourself.
I am yours by parentage and custom and by duty undertaken towards you. I am your wizard. But it is time you recalled that, though I am a servant, I am not your servant.
I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination. I.
I don’t like making the rest of the world live in my dreams, but I certainly don’t want to live in yours.
He was one whose power was akin to, and as strong as, the Old Powers of the earth; one who talked with dragons, and held off earthquakes with his word. And there he lay asleep on the dirt, with a little thistle growing by his hand. It was very strange. Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed. The glory of the sky touched his dusty hair, and turned the thistle gold for a little while.
Dragons think we are amusing. But they remember Erreth-Akbe. They speak of him as if he were a dragon, not a man.
He is the earth and sunlight, the leaves of trees, the eagle’s flight. He is alive. And all who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end.
Let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial.
Question 14: “Are you living your secret desires?” Floored again. I finally didn’t check Yes, Somewhat, or No, but wrote in “I have none, my desires are flagrant.
There is no kingdom like the forests. It is time I went there, went in silence, went alone. And maybe there I would learn at last what no act or art or power can teach me, what I have never learned.
And so, because he won’t let himself be hurt, he does wrong to those he loves best. And then he sees that, and after all, it hurts him.
No, I don’t understand him, but he is worth listening to.