“The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes.”

Listen.’ For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat… where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.

It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.

Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.

If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.

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.

Poetry is an extra hand. It can caress or tickle. It can clench and fight.

Fluttered open the wings and flew off from my clenched hands; those butterflies always found a way to slip by just like time.