The Other Wind (Earthsea Cycle, #6)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

“You never know where you are with a goat.”

maybe the difference isn’t language. Maybe it’s this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do.

“We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We’re yoked, and they’re free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom . . .

“The world’s vast and strange, Hara, but no vaster and no stranger than our minds are. Think of that sometimes.”

Indeed he did not know what weighed more heavily after all, the great strange things or the small common ones.

“The living should not take counsel of the dead.”

“I don’t know which I should fear more,” Tenar said, “death or life. I wish I could be done with fear.”