There are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.
The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.
Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation – overcrowding – reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you’re not, what does that mean? Maybe that you’re afraid of human contact – of being close to people, of being touched.
Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.
The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer’s primary objective, I am not teaching writing; I’m teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.
The more defensive a society, the more conformist.
After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
There is no kingdom like the forests.
Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.
The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.
Even in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence; and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been.
I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
To see a candle’s light one must take it into a dark place.
It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.
Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.
He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.
You have to help another person. But it’s not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you’re doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you’re right and your motives are good isn’t enough.
Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?