“I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that I when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I lived, the breath I breathed.”

—  Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, The Other Wind (2001), Chapter 5, “Rejoining” (p. 286)

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Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Ursula K. Le Guin292
American writer 1929–2018

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