Ursula K. Le Guin - A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)

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Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Heal the Wound, Cure the illness, but let the Dying spirit go

Ursula K. Le Guin
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.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.

Ursula K. Le Guin
For a word to be spoken, Ged answered slowly, there must be silence. Before, and after. Then all at once he got up, saying, I have no right to speak of these things. The word that was mine to say I said wrong. It is better that I keep still; I will not speak again. Maybe there is no true power but the dark.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we play for pleasure or for praise.

Ursula K. Le Guin
It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.

Ursula K. Le Guin
You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

Ursula K. Le Guin
You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do...

Ursula K. Le Guin
From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.

Ursula K. Le Guin
And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.

Ursula K. Le Guin
I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark.

Ursula K. Le Guin
I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.

Ursula K. Le Guin
A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.

Ursula K. Le Guin
He had almost yielded, but not quite. He had not consented. It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.

Ursula K. Le Guin
But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Now they came back to him, on this night he was seventeen years old. All the years and places of his brief broken life came within mind's reach and made a whole again. He knew once more, at last, after this long, bitter, waisted time, who he was and where he was. But where he must go in the years to come, that he could not see; and he feared to see it.

Ursula K. Le Guin
Need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.

Ursula K. Le Guin
In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.

Ursula K. Le Guin