“Always tell yourself that you are as good as anyone that breathes; that you have two hands and a brain, and a little time in which to use them. But they are enough, and no one has any more. And if you train and force them to serve you well, you can reach any height to which you aspire. But to waste any of them is to betray yourself.”

“[F]or when you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you's, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment.”

“Whether you look at no men at all, or look at every single one - itcomes to the same thing. You can throw yourself at their hearts,because you've gone mad from being always a stranger; from not beingable to understand how you can even bear to hold their hands in yourown any longer than you have to.”

“In recent weeks it has come to my attention that many caravans have met with disaster; they have not gotten through."I grunted wisely. "Probably ran out of water. That's the thing about deserts. Dry.""Indeed. A fascinating analysis. But survivors reaching Hebron report differently: monsters fell upon them in the wastes.""What, fell upon them in a squashed-them kind of way?""More the leaped-out-and-slew-them kind. (...)”

“If you couldn't tell the difference between what hurt and what didn't, you had no business being alive. You can't have any good times if you can't tell.”

“A little more money won't do you any good - because daughters can use up ten percent more than a man can make in any normal occupation, regardless of the amount.”

“Why, that's like being told to go up in the hills to find lions, only you do not know whether there are any lions, but if there are, they may be hunting you, and they may be disguised as bushes. Oh, and if you find any lions, try not to let them eat you before you can tell where they are. -Elayne”