A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
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.
You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,’ the mage said…’And life is also a terrible thing,’ Ged said, ‘and must be feared and praised.
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned.
For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.
A scientist can pretend that his work isn’t himself, it’s merely the impersonal truth. An artist can’t hide behind the truth. He can’t hide anywhere.
His alarm clock ticked by the head of the bed. He gazed at its whitish face, the hands both drawing downward. There were no clocks, there. There were no hours. It was not the river of time flowing that moved the clock’s hands forward; their mechanism moved them. Seeing them move men said, Time is passing, passing, but they were fooled by the clocks they made. It is we who pass through time, Hugh thought.
There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.
I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.
So the year went on, a dark year, though now each day had that one bright hour at its dawn.
Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them, all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars. In life is death. In death is rebirth. What then is life without death? Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal?-What is it but death-death without rebirth?
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same…They can be neither separated, nor mixed.