Earthsea Quotes & Sayings

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. — Ursula K. Le Guin

For they were alone, and he was one of the seven persons in the world who knew the Archmage's name. The others were the Master Namer of Roke; and Ogion the Silent, the wizard of Re Albi, who long ago on the mountain of Gont had given Ged that name; and the White Lady of Gont, Tenar of the Ring; and a village wizard in Iffish called Vetch; and in Iffish again, a house-carpenter's wife, mother of three girls, ignorant of all sorcery but wise in other things, who was called Yarrow; and finally, on the other side of Earthsea, in the farthest west, two dragons: Orm Embar and Kalessin. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I like to use my voice as an instrument and just play along with the music. That's really how I tend to my voice. The content usually comes after or during that process of just trying to be an instrument. — LeCrae

[Arren] was proud of his lineage, but thought of himself as an heir of princes, one of the House of Enlad. Morred, from whom that house descended, had been dead two thousand years. His deeds were matter of legends, not of this present world. It was as if the Archmage had named him son of myth, inheritor of dreams. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Go to hell, Willy, our souls eat poetry, but one has seven deadly sins to feed! — David Mitchell

She always brought something when she came on Fridays, and this time it had been a book. A Wizard of Earthsea, written by someone called Ursula K. Le Guin, and already after the first few pages I knew that this was an absolutely fantastic book. — Karl Ove Knausgard

I did not buy a book called Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson, which has the temerity to compare itself, on the front cover, to 'Tolkien at his best.' The back cover attributes the quote to the Washington Post, a newspaper whose quotations will always damn a book for me from now on. How dare they? And how dare the publishers? It isn't a comparison anyone could make, except to say 'Compared to Tolkien at his best, this is dross.' I mean you could say that even about really brilliant books like A Wizard of Earthsea. I expect Lord Foul's Bane (horrible title, sounds like a Conan book) is more like Tolkien at his worst, which would be the beginning of The Simarillion.
The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it's perfect. — Jo Walton

If you want to see what my Earthsea looks like, you could sail past the Scilly Isles (handy for you Brits); or you could go to a little bay called Trinidad on the far north coast of California on a foggy morning (not so handy for you Brits). But these are both places I saw long after I had mapped and travelled in the Archipelago. It was pleasant to be able to say - ah! yes! that looks just like the West Reach! — Ursula K. Le Guin

When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true name, knowing its being: which is more than its use. What, after all, is the use of you? or of myself? Is Gont Mountain useful, or the Open Sea?' Ogion went on a halfmile or so, and said at last, 'To hear, one must be silent. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Having reached a point in which I was so bitter and exhausted from being a quote unquote public figure, I wanted to return to a more childlike relationship to writing. — David Leavitt

As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wizard he had learned the price of the game, which is the peril of losing one's self, playing away the truth. The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater this peril. Every prentice-sorcerer learns the tale of the wizard Bordger of Way, who delighted in taking bear's shape, and did so more and more often until the bear grew in him and the man died away, and he became a bear, and killed his own little son in the forests, and was hunted down and slain. And no one knows how many of the dolphins that leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name in the joy of the restless sea. — Ursula K. Le Guin

A rock is a good thing, too, you know. If the Isles of Earthsea were all made of diamond, we'd lead a hard life here. Enjoy the illusions, lad, and let the rocks be rocks. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Misfortune nobly born is good fortune. — Marcus Aurelius

I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken. — John Updike

So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Godless behavior will never provide the peace and joy it promises to produce. — Jonah Books

Under the Constitution, the president, not the Senate, nominates and appoints judges. The Senate has a different role. We must give our advice . — Orrin Hatch

I had said that Le Guin's worlds were real because her people were so real, and he said yes, but the people were so real because they were the people the worlds would have produced. If you put Ged to grow up on Anarres or Shevek in Earthsea, they would be the same people, the backgrounds made the people, which of course you see all the time in mainstream fiction, but it's rare in SF. — Jo Walton

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

Am I supposed to feel so much awe and so on about the Godking? After all, he's just a man ... He's about fifty years old, and he's bald. And I'll bet he has to cut his toenails too like any other man. I know perfectly well he's a god, too. But what I think is, he'll be much godlier after he's dead. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It is a great thing about having young children, is that they don't really care whether you're the chief justice or whatever, and they do make sure that you have a good perspective on life and what's important. — John Roberts

To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I did not deliberately invent Earthsea, I did not think 'Hey wow - islands are archetypes and archipelagoes are superarchetypes and let's build us an archipelago! I am not an engineer, but an explorer. I discovered Earthsea. — Ursula K. Le Guin

A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Then Ged pitied her. She was like a white deer caged, like a white bird wing-clipped, like a silver ring in an old man's finger. — Ursula K. Le Guin

On the sea he wished to meet it, if meet it he must. He was not sure why this was, yet he had a terror of meeting the thing again on dry land. Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, no running of river or spring, in the dark land where once Ged had gone. Death is the dry place. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The radiation was worse by far. I had bandages all over my head. I looked like a mummy. On the side of my head and neck and down to my collarbone, I had second-degree burns. My skin blistered and peeled before it grew back. That was the worst part of it. — Bob McNair

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. — Ursula K. Le Guin