Quotes: The Farthest Shore (Earthsea)

Quotes from The Farthest Shore by Ursula Le Guin

'He does have a Gontish accent.'

'If I could speak to dragons in their own language,' Arren said, 'I wouldn't care about my accent.'

When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.

'In Enlad,' said Arren after a while, 'we have a story about the boy whose schoolmaster was a stone.'

'Aye?.. What did he learn?'

'Not to ask questions.'

For discipline is the channel in which our acts run strong and deep; where there is no direction, the deeds of men run shallow and wander and are wasted.

For in this love he now felt there was compassion: without which love is untempered, and is not whole, and does not last.

The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

'Life without end,’ the mage said. ‘Life without death. Immortality. Every soul desires it, and its health is the strength of its desire. But be careful, Arren. You are one who might achieve your desire.'

'And then?'

'And then — this. This blight upon the lands. The arts of man forgotten. The singer tongueless. The eye blind. And then? A false king ruling. Ruling forever. And over the same subjects forever. No births; no new lives. No children. Only what is mortal bears life, Arren. Only in death is there rebirth. The Balance is not a stillness. It is a movement — an eternal becoming.'

To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place.

No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars...

Quotes from A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan

Tehanu