“If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even.”

“If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, like the center of the Square, it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern. You saw the foundations of the world. And they were solid.”

“Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.”

“They can send death at once, but life is slower...”

“And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet I would remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.”

“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.”

“All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apartfrom older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn fromcertain great dominants of our contemporary life -- science, all the sciences,and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them.Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, analternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is ametaphor.A metaphor for what?If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all thesewords, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and usedup my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly,that the truth is a matter of the imagination.”