Quotes from Sylvia Engdahl

Awed, I asked, 'How could you possibly have known enough about Jarel to trust him?' 'I didn't. I trusted you.

Yet if they kept on, without knowing, then someday they might discover something totally new and significant just from having followed a different path, something Elana's people had missed. Thousands of years from now, the natives of this world might do the same! If that was how it worked, then it was worth whatever sacrifice anybody had to make.

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." That

It's like parents choosing to raise their own standard of living rather than to provide for the future of their kids. You wouldn't consider that very admirable would you?