If a word can heal, a word can wound,” the witch said. “If a hand can kill, a hand can cure.
He had always loved her, but had not understood that he loved her beyond anyone and anything. When he was with her, even when he was down on the docks thinking of her, he was alive.
But old women are different from everybody else, they say what they think.
Maybe after I die people will be as they were before I was born, and before you came. But I do not think they will.
It’s so much easier to blame the grownups than to be one.
Fear is seldom wise and never kind.
No way was clear, no light unbroken, in the forest. Into wind, water, sunlight, starlight, there always entered leaf and branch, bole and root, the shadowy, the complex.
So he made his choice without even knowing he had made one.
This is the dream now, the evil dream. I thought to drive it, but it drives me.
The city of happiness, well, we all live there and people go about their business with full knowledge of the child in the closet. And then at times I refuse to believe we are in the city of happiness and that instead we are all ones who walked away. Until I read in the news that a man was waterboarded 103 times in one month. Then I think we are all in the closet. Too stupid to understand what life we could have outside the walls around us.
Mede stood accused of heresy. He had been seen out on the fields pointing an instrument at the Sun, a device, they said, for measuring distances. He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.
Athshe, which meant the Forest, and the World. So Earth, Terra, meant both the soil and the planet, two meanings and one. But to the Athsheans soil, ground, earth was not that to which the dead return and by which the living live: the substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.
As you know, Jim, a woman who competes successfully with men in a field men consider theirs by right risks being punished for it.
Rules are made to be broken. Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
How shall we deal with strangers, except as brothers?
As the virtual world of electronic communication becomes the world many of us inhabit all the time, in turning to imaginative literature we may not be seeking mere reassurance nor be impelled by mere nostalgia. To enter with heart and mind into the world of the imagination may be to head deliberately and directly toward, or back toward, engagement with the real world.
It’s a serious age, eighty eight. If you turn the numbers on their side, it’s two infinities on top of each other.
Fear is very useful. Like darkness; like shadows.“... “It’s queer that daylight’s not enough. We need the shadows, in order to walk.
Games and stories are imitations of life, ways of playing at life, sometimes ways of learning how to live.
She never saw why something could not be. Another reason he loved her.