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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guinn, Tales from Earthsea

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“There is no death for an otter, only life to the end.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“We all do harm by being.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“If a word can heal, a word can wound,” the witch said. “If a hand can kill, a hand can cure.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“This writing doesn't affect reality any more than any writing does; that is to say, indirectly, but considerably.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“Injustice makes the rules and courage breaks them.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“things change:
authors and wizards are not always to be trusted:
nobody can explain a dragon.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“No one, no matter how strong or wise or great, can rightly own and use another.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“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”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“Why had he lived so long among those who were not kind?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“She never saw why something could not be. Another reason he loved her.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“patience with him either, always at him to hurry up and”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“Rules are made to be broken. Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“And if not a happy ending, that was a true joy, which may be enough to ask for, after all.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea