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“The world’s vast and strange, Hara, but no vaster and no stranger than our minds are. Think of that sometimes.”
Manipulated, one manipulates others.
Indeed he did not know what weighed more heavily after all, the great strange things or the small common ones.
But it may be only our ignorance that’s led us to use it wrongly.
How men feared women! she thought, walking among the late-flowering roses. Not as individuals, but women when they talked together, worked together, spoke up for one another—then men saw plots, cabals, constraints, traps being laid. Of course they were right. Women were likely, as women, to take the next generation’s part, not this one’s; they wove the links men saw as chains, the bonds men saw as bondage.
was like knowing the way to go, he thought, like knowing the direction of home. Not a thing one could identify or even say much about, but a connection on which everything else depended.
“My honor is that I was your prophet, Woman of Gont,” he said, with a kind of exulting tenderness.
Maybe it had not been horror. Maybe it had been awe.
It seemed to us that here, on this ground, with your knowledge and power aiding us, we might foresee and meet that event, not letting it overwhelm our understanding.
“I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”
He grinned a little as he thought it; for he had always liked that pause, that fearful pause, the moment before things changed.
I was writing my main characters through my own life and their lives, and they were long, rich lives. I am grateful to my readers for living those lives with them.
