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I would learn from teachers and books which I chose for myself, but I would not take advice I had not asked for. I refused to be told what to do or what to think. If I was free, I would be free by myself. I was like a baby when it first stands up.
he always spoke truth, and I think he followed his own heart when he could.
I turned and took his hand and laid my forehead against it for a moment, the only time in my life I ever did that of my own free will.
I was utterly miserable, and yet fearless as I had never been. I was carefree. It was like dying. It would be foolish to worry about anything while one died.
I alarmed the kitten taking it out of its basket, and it bit my thumb to the bone. It was tiny and frail but it had teeth. I began to have some respect for it.
I sang with them. I heard what that sounds like, so many women singing together, what a big, deep sound it makes.
Forgive me. I want very much to know you.” After a while I said, “I want to tell you. But it’s so bad. It’s so ugly. Here, now, it’s beautiful. I don’t want to lose it.”
A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked.
It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery. So I wrote this book for my friend, with whom I have lived and will die free.
What a fool, to leave the embassy where at least he’d been harmless, and let himself be got hold of by these desperate defenders of a lost cause, who might do a good deal of harm not only to but with him.
The rest of his thinking about it he would do as long as he lived. He had learned things he had not known. He had thought he understood what it was to be helpless. Now he knew he had not understood.
His mind contained the beauty and the terrible grief of the place, assured that the existence of one cannot justify the other, the destruction of one cannot destroy the other. He was aware of both, only aware.
He had forgotten the utter impenetrability of the person who has no private life, the intactness of the wholly vulnerable.
He needed someone to trust him, for since the cage he could not trust himself.
It was when he was alone, thinking, sleeping. He was alone most of the time. Something in his mind, deep in him, was injured, broken, had not mended, could not be trusted to bear his weight.
“I am not one of you. I neither own nor am owned. You must redefine yourselves to include me.”
Fool, Esdan said to himself, old fool, to take the moral high ground! But he did not know what ground to stand on.
She raised herself up and very carefully transferred the sleeping baby into Esdan’s arms, onto his lap. “You do hold my joy,” she said.
“He didn’t really guide us,” the fourteen-year-old argued. “Yes, he did. We followed his weakness. His incompleteness. Failure’s open. Look at water, Esi. It finds the weak places in the rock, the openings, the hollows, the absences.
“How long has he lived?” “As long as his life.”
A cure for avo existed, in some places, for some children. Not in this place, not for this child. Neither anger nor hope served any purpose. Nor grief. It was not the time for grief yet. Rekam was here with them, and they would delight in him as long as he was here. As long as his life. He is my great gift. You do hold my joy.
Water is my guide, he thought. His hands still felt what it had been like to hold the child, the li...
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They all want to use me, but I’ve outlived my usefulness, he thought; and the thought went through him like a shaft of clear light. He had kept thinking there was something he could do. There wasn’t. It was a kind of freedom.
Fool, to think you could give anybody freedom. That was what death was for.
Then darkness. And for some time silence.
A new series of explosions, seeming far away, but the ground and the darkness shivered. They shivered in it.
It was hard to accept that one’s eyes did not adjust to the darkness, that however long one waited one would see nothing.
Her voice sounded strange. She was in tears.
“Everybody up there did die, I think.” “That would simplify things for us,” Esdan murmured. “But we are the buried ones,” said Kamsa.
Monotonous, rhythmic, buzzy, purring, the sound made warmth, made comfort.
I have lived here forty years desiring freedom, his mind said to him. That desire brought me here. It will bring me out of here. I will hold fast.
The light was strange, dim.
He did not quite lose consciousness, but things were confused in his mind for a good while.
Her face clenched up, her lips drawing back, her brows down. She wept, without tears and in silence. “The water is cold.”
Such random records reveal a clear moment here and there, though all between those moments is darkness. They are like glimpses of a lighted ship far out at sea, in darkness, in the rain.
There girls walking out to fetch the cows home tell stories of the women of the Hand, who are forgotten everywhere else in the world, even on Roke, but remembered among those silent, sunlit roads and fields and in the kitchens by the hearths where housewives work and talk.
It was hard for him to lie. He thought he was awkward at it because he had no practice. Hound knew better. He knew that magic itself resists untruth.
But the art of magic, though it may be used for false ends, deals with what is real, and the words it works with are the true words. So true wizards find it hard to lie about their art. In their heart they know that their lie, spoken, may change the world.
The guesswork of a wizard is close to knowledge, though he may not know what it is he knows.
Yet like Hound he was brutal not cruel.
him by the throat and choked him, bound his hands, pressed on his lungs. He crouched, gasping. He could not think; he could not remember. “Stay with me,” he said, and did not know who he spoke to. He was frightened, and did not know what he was frightened of.
But in his body, not in his mind, burned a knowledge he could not name any more, a certainty that was like a tiny lamp held in his hands in a maze of caverns underground.
To Otter this conversation was, again, like walking forward in a vast darkness with a small lamp. Anieb’s understanding was that lamp. Each step revealed the next step he must take, but he could never see the place where he was.
Mild sunlight and long shadows streaked the hillsides.
speaking in the Language of the Making words he did not know until he spoke them.
The spells were gone, but the people in the tower did not know it, working on under the greater spell of hopelessness.
She was there, the sick woman who could heal him, the poor woman who held the treasure, the stranger who was himself.
Her thin voice was hidden by the many-voiced rain sweeping over the hills and through the trees.
The pallor of the werelight had faded, drowned in a fainter, vaster clarity.
He did so at last, watching to see if she was gentle with his friend and would protect her.
