The Other Wind Quotes

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“So maybe the difference isn't language. Maybe it's this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they're not evil. They're beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it.
We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom...”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“We broke the world to make it whole...”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“It is a great deal to ask of a kitten, to defend a man against the armies of the dead.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“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 generations part, not this one's; they wove the links men saw as chains, the bonds men saw as bondage.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“The world’s vast and strange, Hara, but no vaster and no stranger than our minds are.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“I’d rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer,”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“Well," he said slowly, "sometimes there's a passion that comes in its springtime to ill fate or death. And because it ends in its beauty, it's what the harpers sing of and the poets make stories of: the love that escapes the years....

"All or nothing, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“He grinned a little as he thought it; for he had always liked that pause, that fearful pause, the moment before things changed.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“But we're all walking in the night, now, on ground we don't know. When the day comes we may know where we are, or we may not.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“Greed puts out the sun.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“He took her hand, and they crossed together into the sunlight.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“As soon as I came there, I knew I could sleep. I felt as if I'd been asleep all along, in an evil dream, and now, here, I was truly awake: so I could truly sleep. There was a place he took me to, in among the roots of a huge tree, all soft with the fallen leaves of the tree, and he told me I could lie there. And i did, and I slept. I cannot tell you the sweetness of it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“he had spent his life learning how to choose to do what he had no choice but to do.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“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.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“They are beasts as we are beasts. Men are animals that speak.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“They sat on a long bench beside the house door to see the sun go down. Sparrowhawk had brought out a bottle and two squat, thick cups of greenish glass. “My wife’s son’s wine,” he said. “From Oak Farm, in Middle Valley. A good year, seven years back.” It was a flinty red wine that warmed Alder right through. The sun set in calm clarity. The wind was down. Birds in the orchard trees made a few closing remarks.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“The world’s vast and strange, Hara, but no vaster and no stranger than our minds are. Think of that sometimes.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“There’s no less or greater in an absolute thing,” Sparrowhawk said. “All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that’s the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it’s life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“- To mnie przerasta - rzekł.
Stary człowiek przyglądał mu się chwilę w milczeniu.
- Świat jest olbrzymi i niezwykły, Haro. Lecz nie większy i nie dziwniejszy niż nasze umysły. Pomyśl o tym czasem.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that’s the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it’s life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“She listened intently, seriously, as if these small matters were as weighty as the strange events they had talked about here three days ago—the dead calling to a living man, a girl becoming a dragon, dragons setting fire to the islands of the west.

Indeed he did not know what weighed more heavily after all, the great strange things or the small common ones.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“The sun set in calm clarity. The wind was down. Birds in the orchard trees made a few closing remarks.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“There's no less or greater in an absolute thing," Sparrowhawk said. "All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?"
He spoke softly but with fire and energy; then he leaned back, and after a minute said, with a half smile, "Every oaf of a farm boy sings that, every young girl that dreams of love knows it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“Tamahkârlık güneşi söndürür.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“Fire broke from the far, black peaks of the mountains called Pain, the fire that burns in the heart of the world, the fire that feeds dragons.
He looked into the sky over those mountains and saw, as he and Ged had seen them once above the western sea, the dragons flying on the wind of morning.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“I was wrong. But it is not right to want to die," the Summoner said. 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 is also given us," said the king.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind