Tehanu (Earthsea Cycle, #4)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

“But in time nothing can be without becoming.

There was nothing she could do, but there was always the next thing to be done.

so he did the “women’s work” and thought nothing about it. It would be a pity, she thought, if he did think about it, if he started fearing that his dignity hung by a dishcloth.

Trust a goat to spoil anything.

Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.

What wrong could she be? Wronged, wronged beyond all repair, but not wrong.

“You’ll know the value of a good reputation,” Moss said dryly, “when you’ve lost it. ’Tisn’t everything. But it’s hard to fill the place of.”

He thought he had learned pain, but he would learn it again and again, all his life, and forget none of it.

It is pleasant to be mothered by a daughter, and to behave as a daughter to one’s daughter.

But it was not enough, the right and the truth. There was a gap, a void, a gulf, on beyond the right and the truth.

What could you do but lock the doors? But it’s like we’re all our lives locking the doors. It’s the house we live in.”

She obeys me, but only because she wants to.” “It’s the only justification for obedience,” Ged observed.

There’s no mercy in me, only justice. I wasn’t trained to mercy. Love is the only grace I have.

“If your strength is only the other’s weakness, you live in fear,” Ged said.

Real power, real freedom, would lie in trust, not force.”

“What cannot be mended must be transcended.”