Tales From Earthsea Quotes

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.

What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.

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.

Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it’s then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty.

We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age. We know a dozen Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo's lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change.

And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry. Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivialises.

We all do harm by being.

There is no death for an otter, only life to the end.

If a word can heal, a word can wound,” the witch said. “If a hand can kill, a hand can cure.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable. What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life- of a sort, for a while.

This writing doesn't affect reality any more than any writing does; that is to say, indirectly, but considerably.

Injustice makes the rules and courage breaks them.

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.

No one, no matter how strong or wise or great, can rightly own and use another.

things change: authors and wizards are not always to be trusted: nobody can explain a dragon.

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.

They way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened. I believe this isn't very different from what historians of the so-called real world do. Even if we are present at some historic event, so we comprehend it - can we even remember it - until we can tell it as a story? And for events in times or places outside our own experience, we have nothing to go on but the stories other people tell us. Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it's then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty. If we let it drop from memory, only imagination can restore the least glimmer of it. If we lie about the past, forcing it to tell a story we want it to tell, to mean what we want it to mean, it loses its reality, becomes a fake. To bring the past along with us through time in the hold-alls of myth and history is a heavy undertaking; but as Lao Tzu says, wise people march along with the baggage wagons.

Now, what is forbidden to the summoner, or any wizard, is to call a living spirit. We can call to them, yes. We can send to them a voice or a presentment, a seeming, of ourself. But we do not summon them, in spirit or in flesh, to come to us. Only the dead may we summon. Only the shadows. You can see why this must be. To summon a living man is to have entire power over him, body and mind. No one, no matter how strong or wise or great, can rightly own and use another.

Where my love is going There will I go. Where his boat is rowing I will row. We will laugh together, Together we will cry. If he lives I will live, If he dies I die. Where my love is going There will I go. Where his boat is rowing I will row.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude.

So these are reports of my explorations and discoveries: tales from Earthsea for those who have liked or think they might like the place, and who are willing to accept these hypotheses: things change: authors and wizards are not always to be trusted: nobody can explain a dragon.

I spoke your true name. It's not what I thought it would be. And I don't feel easy about it. As if I'd left something unfinished. But it is your name. If it betrays you, then that's the truth of it." Rose hesitated and then spoke less angrily, more coldly: "If you want the power to betray me, Irian, I'll give you that. My name is Etaudis." "Dragonfly

patience with him either, always at him to hurry up and

Rules are made to be broken. Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.

She never saw why something could not be. Another reason he loved her.

Why had he lived so long among those who were not kind?

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. In one of T. S. Eliot’s poems a bird sings, “Mankind cannot bear very much reality.” I’ve always thought that bird was mistaken, or was talking only about some people. I find it amazing how much of the real world most of us can endure. Not only endure, but need, desire, crave. Reality is life. Where we suffocate is in the half-life of unreality, untruth, imitation, fakery, the almost-true that is not true. To be human is to live both within and beyond the narrow band of what-happens-now, in the vast regions of the past and the possible, the known and the imagined: our real world, our true Now.

The word power has two different meanings. There is power to: strength, gift, skill, art, the mastery of a craft, the authority of knowledge. And there is power over: rule, dominion, supremacy, might, mastery of slaves, authority over others. Ged was offered both kinds of power. Tenar was offered only one. Heroic fantasy descends to us from an archaic world. I hadn’t yet thought much about that archaism. My story took place in the old hierarchy of society, the pyramidal power structure, probably military in origin, in which orders are given from above, with a single figure at the top. This is the world of power over, in which women have always been ranked low. In such a world, I could put a girl at the heart of my story, but I couldn’t give her a man’s freedom, or chances equal to a man’s chances. She couldn’t be a hero in the hero-tale sense. Not even in a fantasy? No. Because to me, fantasy isn’t wishful thinking, but a way of reflecting, and reflecting on reality. After all, even in a democracy, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, after forty years of feminist striving, the reality is that we live in a top-down power structure that was shaped by, and is still dominated by, men. Back in 1969, that reality seemed almost unshakable. So I gave Tenar power over—dominion, even godhead—but it was a gift of which little good could come. The dark side of the world was what she had to learn, as Ged had to learn the darkness in his own heart.

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.

Will it make any difference? Will the slaves go free? Will beggars eat? Will justice be done? I think there’s an evil in us, in humankind. Trust denies it. Leaps across it. Leaps the chasm. But it’s there. And everything we do finally serves evil, because that’s what we are. Greed and cruelty. I look at the world, at the forests and the mountain here, the sky, and it’s all right, as it should be. But we aren’t. People aren’t. We’re wrong. We do wrong. No animal does wrong. How could they? But we can, and we do. And we never stop.

All the mystery and wisdom of the masters, when it's out in the daylight, doesn't amount to so much, you know. Tricks of the trade. Wonderful illusions. But people don't want to know that. They want the illusions, the mysteries. Who can blame them? There's so little in life that's beautiful and worthy.

The guesswork of a wizard is close to knowledge, though he may not know what it is he knows.

A note sung, however well sung, wrecks the tune it isn't part of.

He was used to being listened to, not to listening. Serene in his strength and obsessed with his ideas, he had no thought beyond them.

But she thought with love of the roads and fields of Way. She thought of Old Iria village, the marshy spring under Iria Hill, the old house on it. She thought about Daisy singing ballads in the kitchen, winter evenings, beating out the time with her wooden clogs; and old Coney in the vineyards with his razor-edge knife, showing her how to prune the vine "right down to the life in it;" and Rose, her Etaudis, whispering charms to ease the pain in a child's broken arm. I have known wise people, she thought. Her mind flinched away from remembering her father, but the motion of the leaves and shadows drew it on. She saw him drunk shouting. She felt his prying, tremulous hands on her. She saw him weeping; sick, shamed; and grief rose up through her body and dissolved, like an ache that melts away in a long stretch of arms. He was less to her than the mother she had not known. She stretched, feeling the ease of her body in the warmth, and her mind drifted back to Ivory. She had had no one in her life to desire. When the young wizard first came riding by so slim and arrogant, she wished she could want him; but she didn't and couldn't, and so she had thought him spell-protected. Rose had explained to her how wizards' spells worked "so that it never enters your head nor theirs, see, because it would take from their power, they say." But Ivory, poor Ivory, had been all too unprotected. If anybody was under a spell of chastity it must have been herself, for charming and handsome as he was she had never been able to feel a thing for him but liking, and her only lust had been to learn what he could teach her.

Trust,” the young man said. “Yes. But against— Against them?— Gelluk’s gone. Maybe Losen will fall now. Will it make any difference? Will the slaves go free? Will beggars eat? Will justice be done? I think there’s an evil in us, in humankind. Trust denies it. Leaps across it. Leaps the chasm. But it’s there. And everything we do finally serves evil, because that’s what we are. Greed and cruelty. I look at the world, at the forests and the mountain here, the sky, and it’s all right, as it should be. But we aren’t. People aren’t. We’re wrong. We do wrong. No animal does wrong. How could they? But we can, and we do. And we never stop.

Det som förblir oförändrat för länge förstör sig själv. Skogen är evig därför att den dör och dör och därför lever." (s. 319)

A cat came round the corner of a garden, no abandoned starveling but a white-pawed, well-whiskered, prosperous cat.

Susmak hem her şeye, hem hiçbir şeye cevaptır,

The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.

O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a time, now isn't then.

That's the art, eh? What to say, and when to say it. And the rest is silence.

Bir şey değişecek mi? Köleler hürleşecek mi? Dilenciler yiyecek bir lokma bulacak mı? Adalet yerine gelecek mi? Galiba bizde, insanlıkta bir kötülük var. Güven bunu inkar ediyor. Bunun üzerinden atlıyor. Bu derin uçurumdan atlıyor. Ama uçurum orada. Ve yaptığımız her şey sonunda kötülüğe hizmet ediyor çünkü biz kötüyüz. Açgözlülük ve zulüm. Dünyaya bakıyorum, buradaki ormanlara ve dağa, gökyüzüne, her şey yerli yerinde, olması gerektiği gibi. Ama biz öyle değiliz. İnsanlar değil. Biz hatalıyız. Yanlış yapıyoruz. Hiç yanlış yapan hayvan yok. Nasıl yapsınlar? Ama biz yapabiliriz ve yapıyoruz. Ve hiç durmuyoruz.

Eğitilmemiş yetenek, kılavuzsuz bir gemiye benzer.

Even if we are present at some historic event, do we comprehend it—can we even remember it—until we can tell it as a story?

My friend, what is it you think to do, to learn? What is she, that you ask this for her?” “Who are we,” said the Doorkeeper, “that we refuse her without knowing what she is?

All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.

Plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change.

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.

I find it amazing how much of the real world most of us can endure. Not only endure, but need, desire, crave. Reality is life. Where we suffocate is in the half-life of unreality, untruth, imitation, fakery, the almost-true that is not true. To be human is to live both within and beyond the narrow band of what-happens-now, in the vast regions of the past and the possible, the known and the imagined: our real world, our true Now.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great storytellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

And everything we do finally serves evil, because that's what we are. Greed and cruelty. I look at the world, at the forests and the mountains here, the sky, and it's all right, as it should be. But we aren't. People aren't. We're wrong. We do wrong. No animal does wrong. How could they? But we can, and we do. And we never stop.

Things came round if you could wait for them.

All animals were patient, but the patience of the horse kind was wonderful, being freely given. Dogs were loyal, but there was more of obedience in it. Dogs were hierarchs, dividing the world into lords and commoners. Horses were all lords. They agreed to collude.

But the spirit of rivalry worked in the boy as he grew to be a man. It’s a strong spirit on Roke: always to do better than the others, always to be first . . . The art becomes a contest, a game. The end becomes a means to an end less than itself . . . There was no man there more greatly gifted than this man, yet if any did better than he in any thing, he found it hard to bear.

Once the Master of Iria said he would or would not allow a thing, he never changed his mind, priding himself on his intransigence, since in his view only weak men said a thing and then unsaid it.

True art requires a single heart.

He could speak his language only with her. And he had lost her, let her go. The double heart has no true speech. From now on he could talk only the language of duty: getting and spending, outlay and income, the profit and the loss. And beyond that, nothing. There had been illusions, little spells, pebbles that turned to butterflies, wooden birds that flew on living wings for a minute or two. There had never been a choice really. There was only one way for him to go.

The way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened. I believe this isn’t very different from what historians of the so-called real world do. Even if we are present at some historic event, do we comprehend it—can we even remember it—until we can tell it as a story? And for events in times or places outside our own experience, we have nothing to go on but the stories other people tell us. Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination.

This writing does not affect reality any more than any writing does; that is to say, indirectly, but considerably.

Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination.

So people turn to the realms of fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities.

Ama duyduğuma göre, insanı insan yapan davranışlarıymış.

Luckily for him there were no guards about; there were few guards, and they were not on the alert, since the wizard’s spells had kept the prison shut. The spells were gone, but the people in the tower did not know it, working on under the greater spell of hopelessness.

Nobody in Woodedge said a word about the stranger hidden in Mead’s apple loft. They kept him safe. Maybe that is why the people there now call their village not Woodedge, as it used to be, but Otterhide.

We can’t do anything without each other,” he said. “But it’s the greedy ones, the cruel ones who hold together and strengthen each other. And those who won’t join them stand each alone.

Nobody can be free alone.

I could not save one, not one, not the one who saved me,” he said.

For us who live, in hiding, neither killed nor killing. The dead are dead. The great and mighty go their way unchecked. All the hope left in the world is in the people of no account.

If I told you my name,” he said, “my true name—” “I’d tell you mine,” she said. “If that . . . if that’s how we should begin.” They began, however, with the peaches. They were both shy.

Nobody on Roke starved or went unhoused, though nobody had much more than they needed.

Roke’s freedom lay in offering others freedom,

Ignorant power is a bane!

For all our delight in the impermanent, the entrancing flicker of electronics, we also long for the unalterable. We cherish the old stories for their changelessness. Arthur dreams eternally in Avalon. Bilbo can go “there and back again,” and “there” is always the beloved familiar Shire. Don Quixote sets out forever to kill a windmill . . . So people turn to the realms of fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities.

And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry. Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great storytellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable. What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life—of a sort, for a while. Imagination like all living things lives now, and it lives with, from, on true change. Like all we do and have, it can be co-opted and degraded; but it survives commercial and didactic exploitation. The land outlasts the empires. The conquerors may leave desert where there was forest and meadow, but the rain will fall, the rivers will run to the sea. The unstable, mutable, untruthful realms of Once-upon-a-time are as much a part of human history and thought as the nations in our kaleidoscopic atlases, and some are more enduring. We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don’t live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age. We know a dozen different Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo’s lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change.

authors and wizards are not always to be trusted: nobody can explain a dragon.

So he cherished his free hours as if they were actual meetings with her. 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.

They held each other tight, hard, silent for a long time. To Diamond it was as if he held his future, his own life, his whole life, in his arms.

You are uncommonly slow, young man, to recognise your own capacities.

Several times, all of a sudden, in the daytime, there had been a moment when she had known him close in mind and could touch him if she reached out. But at night she knew only his blank absence, his refusal of her. She had stopped trying to reach him months ago, but her heart was still very sore.

He could speak his language only with her. And he had lost her, let her go. The double heart has no true speech. From now on he could talk only the language of duty: getting and spending, outlay and income, the profit and the loss. And beyond that, nothing. There had been illusions, little spells, pebbles that turned to butterflies, wooden birds that flew on living wings for a minute or two. There had never been a choice, really. There was only one way for him to go.

He had seen a father and son work together from daybreak to sundown, the old man guiding a blind ox, the middle-aged man driving the iron-bladed plough, never a word spoken. As they started home the old man laid his hand a moment on the son’s shoulder. He had always remembered that.

Once in his lifetime, if he’s lucky, a wizard finds somebody he can talk to.

And if not a happy ending, that was a true joy, which may be enough to ask for, after all.

still.” They praised his modesty and did not listen to him. Listening is a rare gift, and men will have their heroes.

In the evening he lay down on the ground and talked to it. “You should have told me. I could have said goodbye,” he said.

I’ll tell him that the changes in a man’s life may be beyond all the arts we know, and all our wisdom,

And what would I do there?” “What all the students do. Live alone in a stone cell and learn to be wise!

HE HAD NOT PLANNED OR intended any such adventure, but crazy as it was, it suited him better the more he thought about it.

There was nothing here for him except the girl Dragonfly, who had come to fill his thoughts. Her massive, innocent strength had defeated him absolutely so far, but he did what she pleased in order to have her do at last what he pleased, and the game, he thought, was worth playing. If she ran away with him, the game was as good as won.

The island was drowned beneath the sea, and Elfarran with it.

Only in dark the light,” she said.

A woman on Gont.

Well, my friends,” he said, “what now?” Only the Doorkeeper answered. He said, “I think we should go to our house, and open its doors.

People who live immersed in the ceaseless present tense of electronic media may have no interest in the past, letting mythology replace history, as pre-literate peoples did.

But as I grew up with the un-rearrangeable, implacable durability of print, my education gave me the sense of the past that perceives the present as only the bright restless surface of an ocean.

If you could either do magic or make songs but not both, which might you choose, and why?

We may, I said, turn to fantasy seeking stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities; but the realms of Once-upon-a-time are unstable, mutable, complex, and as much a part of human history and thought as the nations in our ever-changing atlases.

Who are we,” said the Doorkeeper, “that we refuse her without knowing what she is?