Tales from Earthsea

She knew it, but she did not want to know it.

Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.

There’s no way to use power for good.

“What’s that all about?” Golden said to his wife, a rhetorical question. She looked at him and said nothing, a non-rhetorical answer.

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.

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.

It was men’s ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.

Obsessed with tricking the girl, he had fallen into the trap he laid for her. Bitterly he recognised that he was always believing his own lies, caught in nets he had elaborately woven.

O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn’t then.

What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.

“It always seemed to me they’re sort of alike,” he said, “magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.”

Before the gods and after, always, are the streams. Caves, stones, hills. Trees. The earth. The darkness of the earth.

There’s people all over these parts, and maybe beyond, who think, as you said, that nobody can be wise alone. So these people try to hold to each other.

Highdrake said that to make love is to unmake power.

You’ll know what to say when the time comes. That’s the art, eh? What to say, and when to say it. And the rest is silence.

All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.

To which Silence of course made no reply, letting him hear what he had said and feel its foolishness thoroughly.

All the mystery and wisdom of the Masters, when it’s out in the daylight, doesn’t amount to so much, you know. Tricks of the trade—wonderful illusions. But people don’t want to know that. They want the illusions, the mysteries. Who can blame them? There’s so little in life that’s beautiful or worthy.

How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn’t saved, isn’t taught?

Ignorant power is a bane!

Maybe that’s what the Masters are afraid of. Maybe celibacy isn’t as necessary as the Rule of Roke teaches. Maybe it’s not a way of keeping the power pure, but of keeping the power to themselves.

The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.

“The solution lies in secrecy,” said Medra. “But so does the problem.”