A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?

But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard’s power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow . . .”

“I could have done better,” he said to himself, in bitter envy; and all the joy of the evening was darkened for him, after that.

“For a word to be spoken,” Ged answered slowly, “there must be silence. Before, and after.”

Ged went alone into a realm where there was no east or west, no rising or setting of the sun, or of the stars.

And the two voices were one voice.

And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.