Quotes from Sylvia Engdahl

People who love each other can no more keep from communicating than from breathing. —Elana

The human mind is incredible. It can do nothing without belief, yet practically anything with it.

People who love each other can no more keep from communicating than from breathing.

Must a man then live as his fellows live, and never reach beyond?

What is it, I wonder, that makes two people suddenly become important to each other? So important that everything else around them just fades away?

There are different kinds of truth. And if our kind is more mature than theirs, it's so only because we know that.

I know little of magic, Lady,' he said haltingly. 'I am but a woodcutter's son, and there is much that is not given to men to understand; but of this I am sure: there is more to things than we imagine. Beyond the stars are worlds without number, perhaps, and had I never sought to look beyond my own I should be the poorer for it.

It is the only happiness now possible to me, to know that all is well with you

If nobody believed anything except what they understood, how limited we'd be.

But a light now waxed within him at the knowledge that such wonders as he had been shown could exist.

Wherever he went he would be a stranger, for there was no home in the world for such as he.

But as long as he kept on caring, nothing could touch the freedom of his inner thoughts.

It's not enough just to learn what there ISN'T; we need to know what there IS.

Fear isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's a natural result of aiming high.

If the price is high, that doesn't mean that it isn't worth paying. We've the freedom of the universe, and it's a fascinating universe. You'll see much that's good, and you'll never be faced with boredom. And there are great satisfactions. If we can save the people of this world from slavery, for instance

I love you—oh, how terribly I love you—but I could not live in your world for more than a little time. The stars have a hold on me; I would miss them, and I—I would be torn in two, Georyn.

The Oath concerns the future, not the past. You earn its Emblem not by your success in passing exams, but by your free acceptance of the responsibility an agent must carry, your consent to the ordeal of that responsibility.

Yet if salvation of the world lay solely in old men's caution, why would young people be born?

The outcome of belief in magic can certainly surpass all hope...

Why, if nobody believed anything except what they understood, how limited we'd be!

Oh, but he thinks he can save the world by slaying a dragon! With the help of a magic spell!' 'And he must think that. If he ever stops thinking it, it will cease to be true.

Technically he was right, Jarel knew. So why should it seem so important?

It's a lot more comfortable to live in a world where the rules still apply.

The questions you framed are unanswerable, and to be terrified by that is a sign not of weakness but of strength. A weak person wouldn't have opened his mind to such terror.