The Other Wind (Earthsea Cycle, #6)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

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

“I was wrong. But it is not right to want to die,” the Summoner said. The burr of the East Reach was in his voice. He spoke low, almost pleadingly. “For the very old, the very ill, it may be. But life is given us. Surely it’s wrong not to hold and treasure that great gift!” “Death also is given us,” said the king.

“Once when my lord the Archmage was here with me in the Grove, he said to me he had spent his life learning how to choose to do what he had no choice but to do.”

He looked at her and smiled, the broad, sweet smile that she thought, perhaps wrongly, perhaps rightly, nobody but her had ever seen on his face.

I’ve been asked a thousand times to say what a story “means,” and every time I’ve grown surer that so long as I’ve told the story rightly, finding its meaning, or a meaning, is rightly up to its readers.