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“Master,” said Ged, “I cannot take your name from you, not being strong enough, and I cannot trick your name from you, not being wise enough. So I am content to stay here, and learn or serve, whatever you will: unless by chance you will answer a question I have.”

“Ask it.”

“What is your name?”

The doorkeeper smiled, and said his name; and Ged, repeating it, entered for the last time into that House.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“What remains?
Our children?
Homer touched the flame of the candle with his fingers. The answer wasn’t easy to find for him,
Achmed’s words still hurt him. He himself had been damned to be without children, unable for this kind
of immortality, so he couldn’t do anything but choose another path to immortatlity.
Again he reached for his pen.
They can look like us. In their reflection we mirror ourselves in a mysterious way. United with
those we had loved. In their gestures, in their mimics we happily find ourselves or with sorrow.
Friends confirm that our sons and daughters are just like us. Maybe that gives us a certain
extension of ourselves when we are no more.
We ourselves weren’t the first. We have been made from countless copies that have been
before us, just another chimera, always half from our fathers and mothers who are again the half of
their parents. So is there nothing unique in us but are we just an endless mixture of small mosaic parts
that never endingly exist in us? Have we been formed out of millions of small parts to a complete
picture that has no own worth and has to fall into its parts again?
Does it even matter to be happy if we found ourselves in our children, a certain line that has
been traveling through our bodies for millions of years?
What remains of me?”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky

“You want to work spells,' Ogion said presently, striding along. 'You've drawn too much water from that well. Wait. Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience. What is that herb by the path?'
'Strawflower.'
'And that?'
'I don't know.'
'Fourfoil, they call it.' Ogion had halted, the coppershod foot of his staff near the little weed, so Ged looked closely at the plant, and plucked a dry seedpod from it, and finally asked, since Ogion said nothing more, 'What is its use, Master?'
'None I know of.'
Ged kept the seedpod a while as they went on, then tossed it away.
'When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true name, knowing its being: which is more than its use. What, after all, is the use of you? or of myself? Is Gont Mountain useful, or the Open Sea?' Ogion went on a half mile or so, and said at last, 'To hear, one must be silent.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“And then, after five minutes of silence, almost inaudibly, the old man sighed and said, more to himself than to Artyom: ‘Lord, what a splendid world we ruined . . .”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033