Robin Hobb

“That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in such a way that there is no need for its intervention.”

“I healed. Not completely. A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding.”

“Useless to worry until we find ourselves blocked. ... If it happens, then we must simply find a way around it. It may slow us down. But we will never get there at all if we stand still and worry.”

“...To free humanity of time. For time is the great enslaver of us all. Time that ages us, time that limits us. Think how often you have wished to have more time for something, or wished you could go back a day and do something differently. When humanity is freed of time, old wrongs can be corrected before they are done.”

“Stop thinking of what you intend to do. Stop thinking of what you have just done. Then, stop thinking that you have stopped thinking of those things. Then you will find the Now, the time that stretches eternal, and is really the only time there is.”

“If a man does not die of a wound, then it heals in some fashion, and so it is with loss. From the sharp pain of immediate berevement, both the Prince and I passed into the gray days of numb bewilderment and waiting. So grief has always seemed to me, a time of waiting not for the hurt to pass, but to become accustomed to it.”

“All events, no matter how earthshaking or bizarre, are diluted within moments of their occurrence the the continuance of the necessary routines of day-to-day.-FitzMost prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too.-ChadeWhen you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead.-BurrichWe left. Walking uphill and into the wind. That suddenly seemed a metaphor for my whole life.-Fitz”

“Why can't people love one another and still remain free?" Althea demanded suddenly.Amber paused to rub her eyes, then tug thoughtfully at her earring. "One can love that way," she conceded regretfully. "But the price on that kind of love may be the highest of all." She strung her words together as carefully as she strung her beads. "To love another person like that, you have to admit that his life is as important as yours. Harder still, you have to admit to yourself that perhaps he has needs you cannot fill, and that you have tasks that will take you far away from him. It costs loneliness and longing and doubt and...”

“I wonder if I can write this history, or if on every page there will be some sneaking show of a bitterness I thought long dead. I think myself cured of all spite, but when I touch pen to paper, the hurt of a boy bleeds out with the sea-spawned ink, until I suspect each carefully formed black letter scabs over some ancient scarlet wound.”

“Be with me" she said simply "Just for here. Just for now. With gentleness and friendship. To take...the other away. Give me that much of yourself."I wanted her. I wanted her with a desperation that had nothing to do with love, and even, I believe, little to do with lust. She was warm and alive and it would have been sweet and simple human comfort. If I could have been with her and arisen from it unchanged in how I thought of myself and what I felt for Molly, I would have done so. But what I felt for Molly was not something that was only for when we were together. I had given Molly that claim to me; I could not resend it just because we were apart for while.”

“What good is a life lived as if it made no difference at all to the great life of the world?”

“King Shrewd is expecting me, rather he isn't expecting me, and that is precisely why I must go to him now.”

“The fight isn't over until you win.”

“Death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice.”

“...sometimes it only makes one more lonely to know that somewhere else, one's friends and family are well.”

“Fitz: How bad is it?Nighteyes: Mind your own business.Fitz: You ARE my business.Nighteyes: Sharing pain doesn’t loosen it.Fitz: I’m not sure about THAT.”

“Fitz: Shall we get up tomorrow and go looking for a wild pig?Nighteyes: I didn’t lose any wild pigs, did you?”

“Stop longing. You poison today’s ease, reaching always for tomorrow.”

“Someday is someday, and maybe it will be or maybe it won't. This is a human thing, to worry about things that may or may not come to be. You can't eat meat until you've killed it.”

“The man who must brag for himself knows that no one else will”

“For, "Yes," he had sighed on his dying breath, and all knew that was the ultimate prayer one could offer to life.”

“For the weakest has but to try his strength to find it, and then he shall be strong.”

“One must plan for the future and anticipate the future without fearing the future.”

“Life is not a race to restore a past situation. Nor does one have to hurry to meet the future. Seeing how things change is what makes life interesting.”

“That is the challenge Companion. To take what has happened to you and learn from it. Nothing is quite so destructive as pity, especially self-pity. No event in life is so terrible that one cannot rise above it.”

“Tomorrow owes you the sum of your yesterdays. No more than that. And no less.”

“Not being able to think of a reply is not the same thing as accepting another's words.”

“But a living is not a life.”

“if love doesnt come first and linger after, if love cant wait and endure disappointment and seperation, then its not love.”

“But change proves that you are still alive. Change often measures our tolerance for folk different from ourselves. Can we accept their languages, their customs, their garments, and their foods into our own lives? If we can, then we form bonds, bonds that make wars less likely. If we cannot, if we believe that we must do things as we have always done them, then we must either fight to remain as we are, or die”

“Men of passion and vision are often seen as mad.”

“One had a knife. But I had a staff and was trained to use it.”

“Surprise!-FitzChivalry”

“If I had a dog that was sick as often as you are, I'd put it down," he observed kindly.”

“Everyone thinks that courage is about facing death without flinching. But almost anyone can do that. Almost anyone can hold their breath and not scream for as long as it takes to die. True courage is about facing life without flinching. I don't mean the times when the right path is hard, but glorious at the end. I'm talking about enduring the boredom, the messiness, and the inconvenience of doing what is right.”

“It's too late to apologize for I have already forgiven you." -FitzChivalry Farseer”

“Thinking is not always...comforting. It is always good, but not always comforting.”

“I think that old magic draws much of its strength from that acknowledgment: that we are a part of that world.”

“Your future. It awaits only you, to live it and to write it.”

“Do you not see how strange and wonderful that is? That all history balances on an affair of the human heart?”

“Silent," the carved wizardwood on his wrist breathed. "Silent as a blinded ship, floating hull-up in the sea. Silent as a scream underwater.”

“Diplomacy is the velvet glove that cloaks the fist of power.”

“Anticipating pain was like enduring it twice. Why not anticipate pleasure instead?”

“It was hard to reconcile the drumbeats and lifted voices in the night with my memories of flames and the screams of dying men. How could humanity range so effortlessly from the sublime to the savage and back again?”

“It was all so meaningless when I looked at it that way. It was meaningless in the same way as when I stood up from a game and then looked down on the scatter of playing pieces, and realized that they all were just bits of polished stone on a wooden board marked with squares. All the meaning they'd had moments before when I'd been trying to win a game were meanings that I'd imbued them with. Of themselves, neither they nor the board had any significance.”

“The second thing you have to do to be a writer is to keep on writing. Don't listen to people who tell you that very few people get published and you won't be one of them. Don't listen to your friend who says you are better that Tolkien and don't have to try any more. Keep writing, keep faith in the idea that you have unique stories to tell, and tell them. I meet far too many people who are going to be writers 'someday.' When they are out of high school, when they've finished college, after the wedding, when the kids are older, after I retire . . . That is such a trap You will never have any more free time than you do right now. So, whether you are 12 or 70, you should sit down today and start being a writer if that is what you want to do. You might have to write on a notebook while your kids are playing on the swings or write in your car on your coffee break. That's okay. I think we've all 'been there, done that.' It all starts with the writing. ”

“A terrible premonition washed over me. This was how the whole world would end.... They would devour the forest and excrete piles of buildings made of stone wrenched from the earth or from dead trees. They would hammer paths of bare stone between their dwellings, and dirty the rivers and subdue the land until it could recall only the will of man. They could not stop themselves from doing what they did. They did not see what they did, and even if they saw, they did not know how to stop. They no longer knew what was enough.”

“How different would our perception of reality be if... we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams?”

“My blood will only buy you that fool's regard. I will pay a high price for you to be respected by a churl. Nothing bought with blood is worth having, young man.”

“History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.”