“What is a woman's power then?" she asked."I don't think we know.""When has a woman power because she's a woman? With her children, I suppose. For a while...""In her house, maybe."She looked around the kitchen. "But the doors are shut," she said, "the doors are locked.""Because you're valuable.""Oh yes. We're precious. So long as we're powerless.”

“If women had power, what would men be but women who can't bear children? And what would women be but men who can?""Hah!" went Tenar; and presently, with some cunning, she said, "Haven't there been queens? Weren't they women of power?""A queen's only a she-king," said Ged.She snorted."I mean, men give her power. They let her use their power. But it isn't hers, is it? It isn't because she's a woman that she's powerful, but despite it.”

“You're a respectable woman, dearie, and her reputation is a woman's wealth.""Her wealth," Tenar repeated in the same blank way; then she said it again: "Her wealth. Her treasure. Her hoard. Her value...”

“She thought about how it was to have been a woman in the prime of life, with children and a man, and then to lose all that, becoming old and a widow, powerless. But even so she did not feel she understood his shame, his agony of humiliation. Perhaps only a man could feel so. A woman got used to shame.”

“What are we so afraid of? Why don't we let 'em tell us we're afraid? What is it they're afraid of?" She picked up the stocking she had been darning, turned it in her hands, was silent awhile; finally she said, "What are they afraid of us for?”

“Why are men afraid of women?""If your strength is only the other's weakness, you live in fear," Ged said."Yes; but women seem to fear their own strength, to be afraid of themselves.""Are they ever taught to trust themselves?" Ged asked, and as he spoke Therru came in on her work again. His eyes and Tenar's met."No," she said. "Trust is not what we're taught." She watched the child stack the wood in the box. "If power were trust," she said. "I like that word. If it weren't all these arrangements - one above the other - kings and masters and mages and owners - It all seems so unnecessary. Real power, real freedom, would lie in trust, not force.""As children trust their parents," he said.”

“On the planet O there has not been a war for five thousand years, she read, and on Gethen there has never been a war." She stopped reading, to rest her eyes and because she was trying to train herself to read slowly. "There has never been a war." In her mind the words stood clear and bright, surrounded by and sinking into an infinite, dark, soft incredulity. What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality. But my people, she thought, know only how to deny. Born in the dark shadow of power misused, we set peace outside our world, a guiding and unattainable light. All we know to do is fight. Any peace one of us can make in our life is only a denial that the war is going on, a shadow of the shadow, a doubled unbelief. So as the cloud-shadows swept over the marshes and the page of the book open on her lap, she sighed and closed her eyes. thinking, "I am a liar." Then she opened her eyes and read more about the other worlds, the far realities.”