“Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.”

Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it.

When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.

I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.

Hope is a slow business.

Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.

And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to unbuild walls.

I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live.

To have a choice at all is to be privileged.

A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.

Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit.

Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too.

Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died.

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you’ve fallen into good hands – someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.

She was what we used to call a suicide blonde – dyed by her own hand.

The hand is, in the highest degree, a human characteristic. It is man’s organ of grasp and of the sense of touch, while in animals these two functions are relegated to the mouth.

To confer the gift of drawing, we must create an eye that sees, a hand that obeys, a soul that feels; and in this task, the whole life must cooperate. In this sense, life itself is the only preparation for drawing.

As a Christian, I know my life is in God’s hands. He has a plan for me.

In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book.

Through fidelity, we situate ourselves and maintain ourselves in the hands of God so exactly as to become one with them in their action.