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.
The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars.
Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
What is more arrogant than honesty?
Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.
Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn’t know they knew.