Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

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Do you know how to read?'
'No. It is one of the black arts.'
He nodded. 'But a useful one,' he said.

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Sometimes you must go against the wheel's turn.

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The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

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Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.

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Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.

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You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

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Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.

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When we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before.

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Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky.

—The Creation of Éa

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At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.

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No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.

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There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

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To oppose something is to maintain it.

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If your strength is only the other's weakness, you live in fear,

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When I'm writing I don't dream much; it's like the dreaming gets used in the writing.

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The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is 'escapism' an accusation of?

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And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life

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What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.

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I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.

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