E.B. Dawson’s Reviews > A Wizard of Earthsea > Status Update

Love how, though there is plenty of action in this book which you'll find in other fantasies (invaders raiding a village, young mages battling each other with magic, a confrontation with a dragon), the main conflict of the story is man vs himself. The climax is very small stakes in a way: Ged conquering his own pride and the darkness within him.

"Master...I have come back to you as I left: a fool..." ...The mage smiled a little and motioned Ged to sit across the hearth from him, and set to brewing the some tea.


I think I need a few months with Ogion, tending the goats and practicing silence on the island of Gont.

"The power you had to call it gives it power over you: you are connected. It is the shadow of your arrogance, the shadow of your ignorance, the shadow you cast. Has a shadow a name?"

Love how Le Guin spells this out right here, but also constantly throws doubt upon what the shadow is, so that the reader is both sure and unsure up until the finale.

The weather magic in this book definitely influenced my own weather magic in Sing to Me of Rain. :)

It’s been a while since I’ve read this, but I won the whole series at a White Elephant gift exchange so here we go! (Thanks Greg and Michelle)

"And no one knows how many of the dolphins that leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name in the joy of the restless sea."

I know I would XD

"You thought as a boy that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do..."

For when it rained Ogion would not even say the spell that every weatherworker knows, to send the storm aside. In a land where sorcerors come thick, like Gont or the Enlades, you may see a raincloud blundering slowly from side to side and place to place...till at last it is buffeted out over the sea where it can rain in peace. But Ogion let the rain fall where it would. <3 <3 <3

That was quite a first chapter.