“Young he was not, so that one had to call him old, but the word did not suit him.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 1, "The Rowan Tree"

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Young he was not, so that one had to call him old, but the word did not suit him." by Ursula K. Le Guin?

Ursula K. Le Guin photo

Ursula K. Le Guin 292

American writer 1929–2018

Related quotes

“"The cap'n is Wolf Larsen, or so men call him. I never heard his other name. But you better speak soft with him. He is mad this morning. The mate-" But he did not finish. The cook had glided in.”

Jack London book The Sea-Wolf

Source: The Sea-Wolf (1904), Chapter Two

“He was as young as twenty years allowed, and as old as it could make him.”

Mervyn Peake book Titus Alone

Source: Titus Alone (1959), Chapter 5 (p. 815)

“He is immensely fat, and so
Well suits the occupation:
In point of fact, if you must know,
We used to call him years ago,
THE MAYOR AND CORPORATION!”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Canto 5
Phantasmagoria (1869)

“Humayun Khan did exactly that — and he did it for all the right reasons. This accomplished young man was not driven to service as a United States Army officer because he was compelled to by any material need. He was inspired as a young man by his reading of Thomas Jefferson — and he wanted to give back to the country that had taken him and his parents in as immigrants when he was only two years old.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

2010s, 2016, Statement regarding the Khan family (1 August 2016)

“The story of his own connection with the cabin had never been told him. The language of the apes had so few words that they could talk but little of what they had seen in the cabin, having no words to accurately describe either the strange people or their belongings, and so, long before Tarzan was old enough to understand, the subject had been forgotten by the tribe.
Only in a dim, vague way had Kala explained to him that his father had been a strange white ape, but he did not know that Kala was not his own mother.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 6 : Jungle Battles

“Anas reported that the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, "No young man honours an old man on account of his age without Allah decreeing for him one who will honour him in his old age."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 3, hadith number 359
Sunni Hadith

“The lot assigned to every man is suited to him, and suits him to itself.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

III, 4
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book III

“He was pretty. His eyes were kind and young. One had to wonder whether he was fourteen years old, or a thousand, being so smooth and untouched. A little boy peered out of the man's face. He was funny… I was bewildered… a man, responsible for the life and death of thousands, and yet there was no trace on him? One could be frightened of less, and yet so harmlessly innocent? Yes, innocent was the word… I knew I would remember this meeting the rest of my life, because I had never before met an emptyness like this.”

Ingeborg Refling Hagen (1895–1989) Norwegian writer

On Dwight Eisenhower, volume III
Memoirs

“Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.”

Washington Irving book Bracebridge Hall

Bracebridge Hall. Bachelors (1822).

“He never had really been able to understand what it was that she wanted him for…although he felt certain that she wanted him for something real, that he filled some need for her, as she did for him, which could for lack of a more specific term be called love.”

Robert Silverberg (1935) American speculative fiction writer and editor

Source: Short fiction, Against Babylon (1986), p. 276

Related topics