Ursula K. Le Guin

The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.

But the human being likes to be challenged, seeks freedom in adversity.

There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

He, after all, had no standards of manliness, of virility, to complicate his pride.

Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. {...} But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be.

It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.

A man who doesn__ detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government in earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.

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?

Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed.

He seemed not to know the uses of silence.

I think we shall have trouble learning how to lie, having for so long practiced the art of going round and round the truth without ever lying about it, or reaching it either.

[T]hey had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.

The unknown...the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought...The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd.

They let us be, here, in the cage of our ignorance.

But if modesty is interpreted not as diffidence or self-effacingness, but as non-overweening, a realistic assessment of the job to be done and one's ability to do it, then you might say the chief virtue of excellent artists is their modesty...But knowing your limits and going to them isn't arrogance. It's greatness of spirit.

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...

At the pit's bottom is no anger.