“Sometimes you must go against the wheel's turn.”

“To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”

“We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to standoutside things and run them, that way. It just doesn't work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”

“But by God sometimes you have to be able to think about the unthinkable!”

“We didn't talk about problems, or parents, or automobiles, or ambitions. We talked about life....And the sea was there, forty feet away and getting closer, and the sky over the sea, and the sun going down the sky. And it was cold, and it was the high point of my life. I'd had high points before.Once at night walking in the park in the rain in autumn.Once out in the desert, under the stars, when I turned into the earth turning on its axis. Sometimes thinking, just thinking things through.But always alone. By myself.This time I was not alone. I was on the high mountain with a friend. There is nothing, there is nothing that beats that. If it never happens again in my life, still I can say I was there once.”

“You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible and must be feared,' the mage said...'And life is also a terrible thing,' Ged said, 'and must be feared and praised.”

“And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all.”