The light is the left hand of darkness.

Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.

Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.

And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.

Change is freedom, change is life. It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed. There's a point, around age 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. Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.

The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.