Erik Roos’s Reviews > A Wizard of Earthsea > Status Update

“And when he met the shadow in this final end of his folly, he thought, maybe at least he could grip the thing even as it gripped him, and drag it with the weight of his body and the weight of his own death down into the darkness of the deep sea, from which, so held, it might not rise again. So at least his death would put an end to the evil he had loosed by living.”

“At the spring […] I named you, a stream that falls from the mountains to the sea. A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea [..] there lies your hope of strength.”

“The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the longer this peril.”

“It is their own language, and they can lie in it, twisting the true words to false ends, catching the unwary hearer in a maze of mirrorwords each of which reflects the truth and none of which leads anywhere.”

“The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.”

“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 . . .”

“Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given that gift only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakable trust.”

“…it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.”

“But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.”