Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman’s question that is.
Oh, never and forever aren’t for mortals, love. But we won’t be parted till I know it’s right that we part.
Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can’t understand that they end in him, but they don’t end with him.
To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past. Therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.
The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!
The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
Almost everything is double like that for adolescents; their lies are true and their truths are lies, and their hearts are broken by the world. They gyre and fall; they see through everything, and are blind.
To see a candle’s light, one must take it into a dark place. This is the same as to see the good and be grateful, one must compare and contrast it with something worse – not better!
Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.
One must work with time and not against it.
A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.
Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.
Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.
The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.
A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.
By and large books are mankind’s best invention.
Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.
In innocence there is no strength against evil, said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. But there is strength in it for good.
You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.
It is not human to be without shame and without desire.