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Once one knows what heartless people can do, it cannot be entirely forgotten. It always remains among the possible things that can befall you. -- Robin Hobb
There is nothing dishonorable about abandoning pain. Sometimes peace is most quickly found when a man simply stops avoiding it." He shifted slightly in the dark. "And you never again lay awake all night, staring at darkness and thinking of them. -- Robin Hobb
To recognize you are the source of your own loneliness is not a cure for it. But it is a step toward seeing that it is not inevitable, and that such a choice is not irrevocable. -- Robin Hobb
She asked me if the schoolteacher and the horsemaster were still at odds, and by this I discerned that Burrich and Galen's challenge at the Witness Stones had become something of a local legend already. I assured her that peace had been restored. We spent -- Robin Hobb
Her ambitions have always exceeded her abilities." He paused, and looked directly at Regal. "In royalty, that is a most lamentable failing. -- Robin Hobb
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. -- Robin Hobb
I loved that man as I have loved no one else. I do not say I loved him more than I love your mother. But that the way I loved him was different. But if you have heard there was anything improper in our bond, there was not. That was not what we were to one another. What we had went beyond that. -- Robin Hobb
Love isn't just about feeling sure of the other person, knowing what he would give up for you. It's knowing with certainty what you are willing to surrender for his sake. Make no mistake; each partner gives up something. Individual dreams are surrendered for a shared one. -- Robin Hobb
One does not have to be Witted to know the companionship of a beast, and to know that the friendship of an animal is every bit as rich and complicated as that of a man or woman. -- Robin Hobb
Wide gape the gates of yellowed bone. A tongue of plank is our path between the teeth as we walk toward the gullet. Here I will be devoured. This is a true thing, near unavoidable on any path. I must enter those jaws. -- Robin Hobb
She had called herself a whore. That was a man's word, a shame-word flung at a woman. But she did not seem ashamed. She wielded the word like a sword, slicing away all his preconceptions of who she was. She had earned her living by her sex, and she did not seem to regret it. -- Robin Hobb
I know some people see it as this success when the book is finally made into a movie - that marks its success. I don't see it that way. -- Robin Hobb
When the mainstay of one's world is taken away, it's only natural to cling to all the rest, to try desperately to keep things as close to the way they were as one can." He shook his head sorrowfully. "But no one can ever go back to yesterday. -- Robin Hobb
Never have I heard anything so unnerving as a hardened warrior praying to a god known for his merciless heart. -- Robin Hobb
Once I got away from him, I was smart enough to stay away from him. To hunt that one is as wise as to go hunting a porcupine.
I cannot leave this alone, Nighteyes.
I understand. I am the same about porcupines. -- Robin Hobb
I'll be glad to get out on the water again, and gladder still to see Divvytown. I knew it was my home port that first time I saw it.'
'The pirate town? Sa save us all. Does someone wait for you, dearie?' Ophelia asked.
Jek laughed aloud. 'They all wait for me. They just don't know it yet. -- Robin Hobb
No matter what name they call us by, you will always be mine. And I am yours, Bee. And I will always do everything in my power to protect you. Do you understand that? ... I will always need you. I will always want you to be part of my life. Do you understand that? -- Robin Hobb
The care he always took with his own appearance and behavior. "Just because you cannot see a woman does not mean she does not see you." Oh, Burrich. The extra time he still took, grooming a horse that she seldom rode anymore. -- Robin Hobb
As much as I had always longed to be freed of my duties and obligations, being released from such bonds was as much a severing as an emancipation. -- Robin Hobb
To bond to any animal was to promise oneself that future pain -- Robin Hobb
Sometimes," he observed obliquely, "you have to trust people to understand you are not perfect.""
"p. 267: Chade to Fitz -- Robin Hobb
Do you begrudge me that I am who I truly am? Should I pretend otherwise for the sake of pleasing you? If I did, it would be a lie. Would you rather love a lie than know me as I truly am? -- Robin Hobb
I never confuse the cost of something with its value -- Robin Hobb
A moment of panic washed over her. There was so little time, it might even now be too late to shape them. Look at her own daughters. Keffria, who only wanted someone to tell her what to do, and Althea, who only desired that she do her own will always."
p. 429 -- Robin Hobb
Diplomacy may very well be the art of manipulating secrets. What would any negotiation come to, were not there secrets to either share or withhold? -- Robin Hobb
Cats themselves may be very chatty, but they seem to resent it in anyone else. Cats like listeners. -- Robin Hobb
Everybody has felt at one time or another that everyone else in the world had a better shot than they did, so when you engage that, you engage the reader, and I think you create a character that brings the reader more fully into the story. -- Robin Hobb
It's too late to apologize for I have already forgiven you. -FitzChivalry Farseer -- Robin Hobb
If all I had ever done was to be born and discovered, I would have left a mark across all the land for all time. I grew up fatherless and motherless in a court where all recognized me as a catalyst. And a catalyst I become. -- Robin Hobb
I thought we had lost you. I thought we'd done something worse than let you die.' His old arms were tight and strong about me.
I was kind to the old man. I did not tell him they had. -- Robin Hobb
Because your heart will be hammered against him, and your strength will be tempered in his fire. -- Robin Hobb
I have to let you go,' he said in a cracked whisper. 'While I can. Leave me that, Fitz. That I broke the bond. That I did not take what was not mine. -- Robin Hobb
Wait for you? Not likely. I've always had to run ahead of you and show you the way. -- Robin Hobb
Had they been dogs they would have sniffed me over and then drawn back. But humans have no such inbred courtesies. -- Robin Hobb
It doesn't have to be that bad,' Chade said quietly. 'Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too. -- Robin Hobb
I am too swift of tongue. But I think that is the best way to talk to a dragon. -- Robin Hobb
Cruelty is a skill taught not only by example, but also by experience of it. -- Robin Hobb
I could not help but see the hand of the balancer in all of this. Could hatred and determination be a counterweight to organization and experience? I suddenly understood something about the old god of death and why he was also the god of balances. -- Robin Hobb
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. -- Robin Hobb
Strangers had small interest in hurting you. That was always done best by your own family and friends. -- Robin Hobb
I told you I set no limits on my love for you. I don't. Yet I have never expected you to offer me your body. It was the whole of your heart, all for myself, that I sought. Even though I've never had a right to it. For you gave it away ere ever you saw me. -- Robin Hobb
All cats talk however they want. To whomever they want. But only a rude human speaks out of turn. Be quiet. -- Robin Hobb
The sheer improbability of your existence took my breath away. -- Robin Hobb
It's not the sort of thing one asks of a friend. He hasn't offered, and I will not ask it. I will not tear him that way. I am trying to let go. I don't know how. -- Robin Hobb
You know what I feel for you. You have known it for years. Let us not, you and I, alone here, pretend that you don't. You know I love you. I always have. I always will -- Robin Hobb
I looked at her, wanting her with all the lust of my months alone and untouched. But I knew also that for that deeper hunger for companionship and understanding, she offered me no more solace than any man might find in his own hand. -- Robin Hobb
Maybe you have to keep your pain and loss to know that you can survive whatever life deals you. Perhaps without putting your pain in its place in your life, you became something of a coward. -- Robin Hobb
That isn't how I see it, Amber. That isn't how I see it at all. It's just my life, and now that I have finally discovered what I must have to be happy, I'm willing to lay down my life for it. That's all.'
She smiled. 'That is all. You are right. And that is all that All ever is. -- Robin Hobb
We are the sum of all we have done added to the sum of all that has been done to us. -- Robin Hobb
Besides, if there were no dragons of flesh and blood and fire, whence would come the idea for these stone carvings? -- Robin Hobb
He thought perhaps it was a woman's way, to come out of such a storm of emotion and pain as if she were a ship emerging onto calm seas. She had seemed, not at peace, but emptied of sorrow. As if she had run out of that particular emotion and no other one arose to take its place. -- Robin Hobb
She thinks you will succeed. But whether you will know you have succeeded, or if the success will be the one you would have chosen for yourself, well, those are things no one can say now. But she knows you will succeed at whatever you are meant to do."
p.613: Paragon to Brashen (about Mother) -- Robin Hobb
I felt a familiar squeezing in what I thought must be my heart. I had heard of being "heartbroken" or "heavy-hearted" but I had never known it was an actual sensation one felt when the whole world abandons you. -- Robin Hobb
But shall we be happy, to say that we live in the dusk rather than in the full night? Shall we rejoice that we shall only suffer, while your offspring will be the ones to know the torments of the damned? Shall this be why we do not act? -- Robin Hobb
Prudent men never trusted their luck. But Kennit had long ago decided that a man had to trust his luck in order for it to grow. -- Robin Hobb
I was dressed up as a witch for Halloween, and wanted to write a story about my black cat before I went out trick-or-treating. I think it went out with the trash the next day. -- Robin Hobb
You have a wild young heart. Right now, it is like a caged bird that batters itself against the bars. To struggle harder will only hurt you more. Wait, be patient. Your time will come to fly. And when it does, you must be strong, not bloodied and weary. -- Robin Hobb
We were speaking of people living their dreams, and I said that few do, and even fewer enjoy the experience. For too many, when they get their dream, they discover it is not what they wanted. Or the dream is bigger than their abilities, and all ends in bitterness. -- Robin Hobb
From these fragmented remains, one can glean that sore need drove him to seek the homeland of the Elderlings. His troubles are familiar ones; ships raided his coastline mercilessly. -- Robin Hobb
Drink up your false courage and move forward. It's the only direction a man can move in. -- Robin Hobb
Young, Chade suggested. Young and full of righteous fury. Hurt and heartbroken, I suggested. So tired of being thwarted. Tired of being bound by rules that no one else had to follow. -- Robin Hobb
Many great ideas are not unique. They only become unique when the men who have the wherewithal actually to implement them come together. -- Robin Hobb
The death of Nighteyes gutted me. I walked wounded through my life in the days that followed, unaware of just how mutilated I was. I was like the man who complains of the itching of his severed leg. The itching distracts from the immense knowledge that one will forever after hobble through life. -- Robin Hobb
I began attempting to write for children under the mistaken assumption that writing for children was easy. -- Robin Hobb
Too many folk, women and men, love the person they wish to be, as if by loving that person, or being loved by that person, they could attain the importance they long for. -- Robin Hobb
She stared at him suspiciously. 'You drank all -- Robin Hobb
Change rained fast and furious on me for the next fortnight. -- Robin Hobb
A message is not delivered until it is understood, -- Robin Hobb
No man can return to being a boy. But there are interludes in a man's life when, for a time, he can recapture the feeling that the world is a forgiving place and that he is immortal. -- Robin Hobb
That night I grasped another piece of the puzzle that Burrich had always been to me. For there is a very strange peace in giving over your judgment to someone else, to saying to them, You lead and I will follow, and I will trust entirely that you will not lead me to death or harm. -- Robin Hobb
Useless to worry until we find outselves 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. -- Robin Hobb
Burned over water. -- Robin Hobb
Some secrets beg to be betrayed. The secret of undeclared love is like that. -- Robin Hobb
Something killed them. Long ago. I don't know exactly what. Some great cataclysm of the earth, that buried whole cities in a matter of days. It sank the coast, drowning harbour towns, and changed the courses of rivers. It wiped out the dragons, and I think it killed the Elderlings as well. -- Robin Hobb
The art of diplomacy is the luck of knowing more of your rival's secrets than he knows of yours. -- Robin Hobb
Axes bit wood into pieces and hammers nailed it back together. Humans could never accept the world as it was and live in it. They were always breaking it and living amongst the shattered pieces. -- Robin Hobb
I am a minstrel. I know more about lying than you will ever discover. And minstrels know that sometimes lies are what a man needs most. In order to make a new truth of them. -- Robin Hobb
Be very chary of telling your hoarded secrets. Many lose all power once they have been divulged. Be even more careful of sharing your own secrets lest you find yourself a puppet dancing on someone else's strings. -- Robin Hobb
Sometimes luck belongs to children and madmen. -- Robin Hobb
Burrich the Stablemaster, the man who raised me, once warned me, "When you cut pieces from the truth to avoid sounding like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead." I -- Robin Hobb
I'm sorry."
He looked at me. "Some day, Fitzchivalry," he warned me, "those words will not be enough. Sometimes it is easier to pull a knife out of a man than to ask him to forget words you have uttered. Even words uttered in anger. -- Robin Hobb
I think ever since I started to read, there have been favorite novels for different stages of my life. And one is never bumped out of place to yield to another. Instead, I just add to my favorite shelves. -- Robin Hobb
The world had to change and for some reason the prosperity of men always results in them taking ever more from wild creatures and places. -- Robin Hobb
One devoted to his cat would not leave it long alone. A cat's loyalty is not a thing to be taken for granted, but courted day by day. -- Robin Hobb
Choose a place to take a stand. Not where they can corner you but not where they can surround you, either. Find a weapon, a stick, a rock, anything. If you cannot escape, make them pay as dearly as you can for capturing you. Fight them all the way. -- Robin Hobb
You know your duty and you are doing it. It isn't your fault if Althea can't appreciate that. -- Robin Hobb
I idly wished for something else, for any situation that was neither this forsaken chamber nor the tenseness of Burrich's room. For a restfulness that perhaps I had once known somewhere else but could no longer recall. And so I drowsed into oblivion. -- Robin Hobb
A wise old man taught me that diplomacy is the velvet glove that cloaks the fist of power. Persuasion, not force, works best and lasts longest. -- Robin Hobb
Dawn," Thymara scoffed. "I think the dragons meant, "After we wake up and when we feel like it. -- Robin Hobb
And to die with the Warrior's Prayer on his lips. For, 'Yes', he had sighed on his dying breath, and all knew that was the ultimate prayer one could offer to life. Acceptance. -- Robin Hobb
Not intending to be funny: I sit at the keyboard, put my fingers on the keys and go. To me, it's the real secret of writing. Put yourself in front of the screen or the blank sheet of paper and get to work. -- Robin Hobb
Gankis lifted an arm to point at the distant shale cliffs. "And in the face of it there were thousands of little holes, little what-you-call-'ems ... "
"Alcoves," Kennit supplied in an almost dreamy voice. "I call them alcoves, Gankis. As would you, if you could speak your own mother tongue. -- Robin Hobb
Bee, I will always choose to believe you first. So it is your serious responsibility to be righteous in what you do. It is the pact that must exist between us. -- Robin Hobb
Sometimes all the choices are poor ones, Fool, and still a man must choose. -- Robin Hobb
Maulkin abruptly heaved himself out of his wallow with a wild thrash that left the atmosphere hanging thick with particles. Shreds of his shed skin floated with the sand and muck like the dangling remnants of dreams when one awakes. -- Robin Hobb
I found myself speaking softly as if I were telling an old tale to a young child. And giving it a happy ending, when all know that tales never end, and the happy ending is but a moment to catch one's breath before the next disaster. -- Robin Hobb
You are different, Bee. It will make some parts of your life very difficult. But if you always fall back on your differences to explain everything you dislike about the world, you will fall into self-pity."
p. 293 Fitz to Bee -- Robin Hobb
One can only walk so far from one's true self before the bond either snaps, or pulls one back. -- Robin Hobb
I have found the old adages to be true. One can only walk so far from one's true self before the bond either snaps, or pulls one back. I am fortunate. I have been pulled back. I walk once more in trueness to myself."
p. 177: Kettricken to Fitz: -- Robin Hobb
And while you're 'hearing' all this vital gossip, I might point out to you that no wise man tells all he knows. And that he who carries tales has little else in his head. Do you understand me, Brant? -- Robin Hobb
That, I think, is the shock of any relationship ending. It is realizing that what is still an ongoing relationship to someone is, for the other person, something finished and done with. -- Robin Hobb
Death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. -- Robin Hobb
She held his hand and did not look down nor back. -- Robin Hobb
We'd had a message from Just, the first to reach us in many a month. He and Hearth had left home almost three years ago. With youth's fine disregard for the concerns of their elders, they'd sent messages only sporadically. -- Robin Hobb
Ten times dead was very dead indeed. -- Robin Hobb
Leave the pain behind and let your life be your own again. There is a place where all time is now, and the choices are simple and always your own.
Wolves have no kings -- Robin Hobb
Then I'd be dead," I pointed out. "Among other things. Fool, there is no sense in trying to play
that game with the past. Here is where we are today, and we can only make our moves from here. -- Robin Hobb
Leave off sniffing the carcass of your old life-do you enjoy unending pain? There is no shame in walking away from bones. Nor is there any special wisdom in injuring oneself over and over. What is your loyalty to that pain? To abandon it will not lessen you. -- Robin Hobb
Some things may be learned from words on a page, but some skills are learned first by a man's hands and heart, and later by his head. -- Robin Hobb
Vengeance took no account of innocence or right. It was the chain that bound horrific events together, that decreed that one awful act must beget another worse one that would lead to yet a third. It came to me, slowly, that this chain would never end. -- Robin Hobb
Malta," he said, and smiled. "Possibly the most annoying young female I've ever encountered. Yet lovely. I named a horse after her. Do you remember? -- Robin Hobb
When considering a man's motives, remember you must not measure his wheat with your bushel. He may not be using the same standard at all. -- Robin Hobb
I will always take your part, Bee. Right or wrong. That is why you must always take care to be right, lest you make your father a fool. -- Robin Hobb
All this guilt and shame and remorse you carry, Kestrel. Don't you see? That is what they burned you with. And you have added to it, all these years. The wall is of your own making. Take it down. Forgive yourself. Come out. -- Robin Hobb
other tales, the sailors reach a land of intelligent talking animals who find humans disgusting and rather stupid. -- Robin Hobb
Petting the cat makes you feel better, Fennel asserted smugly. -- Robin Hobb
Those were some astounding lies, cub. And the very last one the most inspired of all. You have your father's talent for it. -- Robin Hobb
The ones who chose to live free of inconvenience by tolerating the agony and degradation of others? -- Robin Hobb
You seek a false comfort when you demand that I define myself for you with words. Words do not contain or define any person. A heart can, if it is willing. -- Robin Hobb
Refusing to think about a thing only brings it more strongly to mind. -- Robin Hobb
Danger cups us under its hand, and we can do nothing but stand witness to the turning of the world. Here we walk on the balancing line between futures. Humanity always believes it decides the fate of the whole world, and so it does, but never in the moment that it thinks it does. -- Robin Hobb
How much do you understand?' I demanded of her one afternoon. She cocked her head at me, met my gaze and demanded, 'How much do YOU understand? -- Robin Hobb
You have been with me, as close as the tips of my fingers, even when we were years and seas apart. Your being was like the hum of a plucked string at the edge of my hearing, or a scent carried on a breeze. Did not you feel it so? -- Robin Hobb
This was misery that could not yield, for he sorrowed for a time he could not return to, and a self he would never again be. -- Robin Hobb
Fish?
No fish. Sorry.
"Sorry" is not fish. What good is "sorry"? -- Robin Hobb
His absence seemed a solid thing, a burden I must carry in addition to my grief ... Yet I knew I would continue to live. Sometimes that knowledge seemed the worst part of my loss. -- Robin Hobb
Cats talk to whomever they please. -- Robin Hobb
Long or short, if you worry about every step of a journey, you will divide it endlessly into pieces, any one of which may defeat you. Look only to the end. -- Robin Hobb
Other men might dream of high honors or riches or deeds of valor sung by minstrels. I wanted to come to a small cot as light faded, to sit in a chair by a fire, my back aching from work, my hands rough with toil, and hold a little girl in my lap while a woman who loved me told me of her day. -- Robin Hobb
Be a little puppet on their strings. That was what Reyn wanted from her, also. She recognized that even if he did not. He was attracted to her not just for her beauty and charm, but because she was young. He thought he could control all her actions and even her thoughts. -- Robin Hobb
Men cannot grieve as dogs do. -- Robin Hobb
Start writing sooner. Don't wait for permission. Don't hesitate. -- Robin Hobb
If I gave Bee to Riddle and Nettle, I could undertake the Fool's vengeance. That traitorous thought made me want to vomit. -- Robin Hobb
You should have asked me! You should have asked me!" I hated the tears that suddenly flooded my eyes and how my throat closed and choked me. I didn't want to be sad. I wanted to be angry. Angry hurt less."
p. 501 Bee to Fitz -- Robin Hobb
That destiny is not reserved for a few chosen ones. Each man has a destiny. Recognizing it and fulfilling it are the purpose of a man's life. -- Robin Hobb
There's something stalking us. Off to the side of the road, moving through the forest.'
Kettricken smiled. -- Robin Hobb
There was no point in sighing after what I could not have. It only distracted me from what I did have. -- Robin Hobb
Be the night. Not the wind that stirs the trees, not even the soundless owl a-wing or the tiny mouse crouched motionless. Be the night that flows over all, touching without being felt. For night is a cat. -- Robin Hobb
You are confusing plumbing and love again. -- 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. -- Robin Hobb
Sometimes I regret that the wonderful children's stories that have been made into movies were - people no longer read 'The Wizard of Oz'; they think they know the story. They don't know anything about all the bits and pieces they had to leave out. -- Robin Hobb
Sorrow and loss never die. We can put them away in a chest and lock it tight, but whenever it is opened, even a crack, the aroma of lost sweetness will rise to fill our lungs to heaviness. -- Robin Hobb
When circumstances are right, unlikely people do extraordinary things. -- Robin Hobb
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. -- Robin Hobb
Everything she sang was true. I will leave it to you as to whether the truth can exist with details omitted, or if those lacks make a lie of it. -- Robin Hobb
I flew, I hunted, I killed. I am SINTARA! -- Robin Hobb
What a man can take with a sword, a woman can give by her flesh alone. Life. -- Robin Hobb
If a few students come reluctantly to their studies, then let them go. If all students come reluctantly to their studies, then let your scribe be dismissed and find another. For once students have been taught that learning is tedious, difficult, and useless, they will never learn another lesson. -- Robin Hobb
It was a terrible division, to feel such need for someone, and yet angry that need existed. -- Robin Hobb
You can't die from seasickness, but you wish you could. -- Robin Hobb
Pain is the coin they use now in all their transactions. Nothing else teaches them, nothing else will satisfy them. -- Robin Hobb
No one can have so little that someone else can find nothing to envy. Poverty and simplicity were not shields from the greed of others. If you had nothing left to steal, they'd take your body and enslave it. -- Robin Hobb
I bite my tongue and scowl my love, lest passion make me slave. -- Robin Hobb
A fierce resolve that we would not lose what we had now to what we could not have tomorrow. -- Robin Hobb
I have since come to know that many men always see another's good fortune as a slight to themsleves. -- Robin Hobb
Refuse the anxiety. When you borrow trouble against what might be, you neglect the moment you have now to enjoy. The man who worries about what will next be happening to him loses this moment in dread of the next, and poisons the next with pre-judgement.' Berandol's -- Robin Hobb
When you borrow trouble against what might be, you neglect the moment you have now to enjoy. The man who worries about what will next be happening to him loses this moment in dread of the next, and poisons the next with pre-judgment. -- Robin Hobb
Now, I've had boys of my own, and I know boys aren't that way. They don't learn, or grow, or have manners when you're looking at them. But turn away, and turn back, and there they are, smarter, taller, and charming everyone but their own mothers. -- Robin Hobb
Stop your whining. If you are frightened, be silent. Whining is for prey. It attracts predators. And you are not prey. -- Robin Hobb
Do you do this because you live such short lives? Tell yourselves wild tales of what might happen tomorrow, and feel all the feelings of events that will never happen? Perhaps to make up for the pasts you cannot recall, you invent futures that will not exist. -- Robin Hobb
Look forward, not back. Correct your course and go on. You cannot undo yesterday's journey. -- Robin Hobb
Few things have such sharp edges as the careless words of a boy. -- Robin Hobb
I feared my own kind more than anything the natural world could ever threaten me with. -- Robin Hobb
The knowledge that he had left me with no intent ever to return had come over me in tiny droplets of realization spread over the years. And each droplet of comprehension brought its own small measure of hurt. -- Robin Hobb
There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise. A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense. -- Robin Hobb
One does not need the size of a dragon to have the soul of a dragon. -- Robin Hobb
Ah, Fitz, you should know by now that every moment of my life is spent dancing. And with every partner, I tread a different measure. -- Robin Hobb
Every small, unselfish action nudges the world into a better path. An accumulation of small acts can change the world. -- Robin Hobb
was as charged as if a storm were brewing. It was a storm, she told herself, and one her father had seen gathering for years. Still, it humbled her to watch an old captain like Tenira announce that he would call the first bolt down on himself. -- Robin Hobb
make." He bit off a chunk of the dry meat -- Robin Hobb
They need other people to make them think they're alive. They only feel like they're important if someone else tells them they are. -- Robin Hobb
It was well to impress one's enemies with a show of strength. It was even better to be sure one's friends remembered it as well. -- Robin Hobb
A man's deep friendships were the most important thing he could possess. Things can be broken, or lost. All a man can keep for certain are the things in his mind and heart. -- Robin Hobb
He gave a final shake of his coat. I go to the hunt! -- Robin Hobb
I wish they would all go away.
Except the Fool. I wished he would join me. Somehow, I had always thought he would join me. Now, I could not recall why. Perhaps I had buried that in the stone. -- Robin Hobb
It is difficult to insult the man you don't speak to. -- Robin Hobb
A dark provider skimmed lazily along above them. As it swept over their heads, it cast forth food for them. -- Robin Hobb
Sa'Adar's eyes went wide. "You're mad."
"Scarcely. Why do people always accuse me of that when I'm arranging things to my liking instead of theirs? -- Robin Hobb
One part braggart to one part coward. He would fear everyone he did not control. And the next day he would fear those he controlled even more. -- Robin Hobb
There would always be dishonorable things done to preserve the honor of any power. -- Robin Hobb
One way to disperse fear and create decision was to consider the worst possible outcome of one's actions. -- Robin Hobb
Fun, fun, fun, got you, got you, and got you again! Here, you're dead, here, I broke your forepaw, here, your blood runs out! Got you, got you, got you! -- Robin Hobb
baffled at how he had released her. -- Robin Hobb
They were all gone now, broken or taken by people who had no idea what such items represented. Let them go. She held the past in her heart, with no need of physical items to tie it down. -- Robin Hobb
And my father is dead. She did not speak the words aloud, but the reality of them cut her again, deeper and sharper. It seemed to her that each time she thought she had grasped the fact of his death, a few moments later it struck her again even harder. -- Robin Hobb
Her nakedness was not vulnerability, but armour. -- Robin Hobb
I think when writers play with dragons, we are simply doing what fantasy writers have always done. -- Robin Hobb
As the character talks and moves, the world around him is slowly revealed, just like dollying a camera back for a wider look at things. So all my stories start with a character, and that character introduces setting, culture, conflict, government, economy ... all of it, through his or her eyes. -- Robin Hobb
Does anything feel worse than being angry with people you love?"
"P. 307: Fitz to Chade -- Robin Hobb
All I ever wanted to do was live my own life. And I'm having damn little success at that."
p. 250: Brashen Trell and Amber -- Robin Hobb
Half the evil in this world occurs while decent people stand by and do nothing wrong. It's not enough to refrain from evil, Trell. People have to attempt to do right, even if they believe they cannot succeed. -- Robin Hobb
As if he hadn't always known he was loved the best. That he was the Beloved. -- Robin Hobb
She loved to talk. All I need do was provide the silence. -- Robin Hobb
She had come to letters late in her life, and though she had mastered them, they had never become her good friends. -- Robin Hobb
Passed through fire and plunged through salt water and offered to the winds of the air; thus were names sealed to these chosen children. -- Robin Hobb
He was stupid, stupid, stupid, and his only hope of surviving was in not letting anyone else know how stupid he was. -- Robin Hobb
In my opinion, men deny animals have feelings and thoughts for one basic reason: so they won't feel guilty about what they do to them. But -- Robin Hobb
Any human who dared to attack a dragon deserved to die himself. And dead, of what use was he, unless someone ate him? She didn't see why leaving a human to be eaten by worms was more acceptable. -- Robin Hobb
It is my way, to speak directly. I do not mean to give offense by it. It has always seemed to me that honest words leave the least room for misunderstanding. -- Robin Hobb
One man armed with the right word may do what an army of swordsmen cannot. -- Robin Hobb
Young as I was, I still wondered what kind of man this was who, with one leg bandaged, could quell a room full of rough men with a look or a word. -- Robin Hobb
Sa help us all, but I plan to give her free rein and let her be as unpleasant and bitchy as only she knows how. -- Robin Hobb
It's not the kind of work a man does that says he can be proud or not. It's how he does it. -- Robin Hobb
What you are born to be, you will be, whether it be priest or sailor. So step up and be it. Let them do nothing to you. Be the one who shapes yourself. Be who you are, and eventually all will have to recognize who you are, whether they are willing to admit it or not. -- Robin Hobb
Have you ever stood on a sandy beach when the tide is coming in? Felt the waves come up around your feet and suck the sand from under you. That's my life now. With every day, I feel I sink deeper into uncertainty."
p. 628 The Fool to Fitz -- Robin Hobb
Strange, how being left out of a secret always feels like a betrayal of trust. -- Robin Hobb
Silence asks the questions that are too awkward to phrase. It even asks the questions one does not know to ask. -- Robin Hobb
Be now what you must be to succeed at the end of your journey, and when the end comes, you will find it is just another beginning.' Althea -- Robin Hobb
I lived my grief; I slept mourning and ate sorrow and drank tears. I ignored all else. -- Robin Hobb
For the weakest has but to try his strength to find it, and then he shall be strong. -- Robin Hobb
Ah, Beloved. Of all the things I must bid farewell to, you are the most difficult to lose. Forgive me that I have avoided you. Better, perhaps, that we make a space between us and become accustomed to it before fate forces that upon us. -- Robin Hobb
Thinking is not always ... comforting. It is always good, but not always comforting. -- Robin Hobb
Men cannot grieve as dogs do. We should be grateful for that. -- Robin Hobb
You're not who he expected you to be; that doesn't mean you aren't somebody. Nor are you perfect. Stop using every mistake you make as an excuse to fail completely. -- Robin Hobb
If love doesnt come first and linger after, if love cant wait and endure disappointment and seperation, then its not love. -- Robin Hobb
Sometimes it only makes one more lonely to know that somewhere else, one's friends and family are well. -- Robin Hobb
Men cannot grieve as dogs do. But they grieve for many years. -- Robin Hobb
I healed. Not completely. A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding. -- Robin Hobb
But in my heart, when I said "my king," I meant Verity. -- Robin Hobb
I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty - they are not out on the street; they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata. -- Robin Hobb
If a minstrel must embroider the truth to help us recall it fully, then let her, and let no one say she has lied. Truth is often much larger than facts. -- Robin Hobb
The wise man takes the shortest path to peace with himself.' Acceptance of what is, that is the shortest path. -- Robin Hobb
When settled people look for security, they look for continuity." Here -- Robin Hobb
There was a danger in asking too much of a child, but the danger of asking too little was almost equal. -- Robin Hobb
If one bad thing befell me, I immediately linked it to every bad thing that had happened in the last week or might happen in the coming week. And when I became sad, I was prone to wallow in grief, piling up my woes and sprawling on them like a dragon on a hoard. -- Robin Hobb
It's that which is between the gardener and his bit of soil that makes a garden. -- Robin Hobb
To be part of a family, or any community, is to have duties and responsibility, to be bound by the rules of that group. -- Robin Hobb
And what do you believe?"
A slow smile spread over his face. "I believe in you. You are my new beginning. -- Robin Hobb
Boy," Chade remarked quietly. "Never pretend we are anything but what we are. Assassins. Not merciful agents of a wise king. Political assassins dealing death for the furtherance of our monarchy. That is what we are. -- Robin Hobb
And for that rush of fury? Time. Time passing with no one trying to hurt you or kill you will lessen that reaction. -- Robin Hobb
Dawn came as early as it always does, -- Robin Hobb
I think that old magic draws much of its strength from that acknowledgment: that we are a part of that world. -- Robin Hobb
A small pebble can turn a wheel out of its path, he told me, but warned me that it was seldom a pleasant experience for the pebble. -- Robin Hobb
You can't go back', she told him bluntly. Her voice was neither kind nor unkind. 'That part of your life is over. Set it aside as something you have finished. Complete or no, it is done with you. No being gets to decide what his life is 'supposed to be'. -- Robin Hobb
When people look most vicious, what you are seeing is not their animal side. It is the savagery that only humans can muster. -- Robin Hobb
It's the only way to deal with a man like that. He crawls for you or you crawl for him. It's all he knows. -- Robin Hobb
Men it is who think they can rule others' lives, but have no bonds to them. Do you think that to bond or not to bond is for you alone to decide? My heart is my own. I give it where I will. I will not give it to one who thrusts me aside. -- Robin Hobb
Why had Althea's crazed words affected Etta like this? Then the answer came to him: she was pregnant. Women always behaved strangely when they were pregnant. -- Robin Hobb
She is, Althea thought uneasily, what I pretend to be: a woman who does not let her sex deter her from living as she pleases. -- Robin Hobb
When you fear to fail, you fear something that has not happened yet. You predict your own failure, and by inaction, lock yourself into it. -- Robin Hobb
Housework was comforting. In cleaning and restoring a room, one could assert control. One could even pretend, briefly, that life could be tidied the same way. -- Robin Hobb
I was sick of strife, and weary of being wary. -- Robin Hobb
I began reading everyhing in the family library. Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe. And of course, if you're running out of books to read you can always read Shakespeare. -- Robin Hobb
As I apologized to her a flicker of panic raced through me and then faded away. There wasn't enough life left in me to panic. I'd made a mistake and I was dying. Apparently not even a Speck afterlife was available to me. I'd simply stop being. Apparently I hadn't died correctly. Oops. -- Robin Hobb
This is our last hunt, old wolf. And as we have always done, we go to it together. -- Robin Hobb
How do you politely explain to someone that you had believed for years he was a moron as well as a Fool?
Fitz in Assassin's Apprentice -- Robin Hobb
And so the Wolf of the West rose from the stone! And so he will rise again if ever the folk of the Six Duchies call to him in need. -- Robin Hobb
To Fitz and the Fool.
My best friends for over twenty years. -- Robin Hobb
No. This is right. I feel it. I am the Catalyst, and I came to change all things. Prophets become warriors, dragons hunt as wolves.
Fitz in Assassin's Quest -- Robin Hobb
We were both smiling, in that bittersweet way one does when imagining something the heart longs for and the head would dread. -- Robin Hobb
The Wit is more curse than gift, I sometimes think. Perhaps the hardest part of possessing it is witnessing so completely the casual cruelty of humans. Some speak of the savagery of beasts. I will ever prefer that to the thoughtless contempt some men have towards animals. -- Robin Hobb
A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding. I -- Robin Hobb
We all perish in our last attempt to live. -- Robin Hobb
Doing something stupid and reckless is not a better proof of your love than doing something measured and powerful. -- Robin Hobb
It is the nature of human that we tend to pass our pain along. As if we could get rid of it by inflicting an equal hurt on someone else. -- Robin Hobb
You'd be wise to eat lightly, or not at all, of any food you do not prepare yourself." "At all the feasts and festivities that will be there?" "No. Only at the ones you wish to survive. -- Robin Hobb
They all need the others to say, yes, yes, this is what we should be doing, it's worth the risk. And now that they've decided it, the decision is bigger than all of them. Not one of them could turn back on their own. -- Robin Hobb
But you don't know what will happen.'
'No. That is our curse. To know that something will happen, and only after it is over, to look back and say, "oh, that is what that meant. If only i'd known". It can break your heart. -- Robin Hobb
They regarded our passage not at all, and by the afternoon I felt no more significant than an ant. I had never thought to be disdained by a tree. -- Robin Hobb
If he ever wanted vengeance on me for all I did, he has it now. This is the worst thing he could do to me. Now I know how it feels to be left behind. As I left him. -- Robin Hobb
Instead, we must focus on our hopes. If we cannot anchor ourselves in a belief that we will succeed, we have already been defeated. -- Robin Hobb
I lay down to sleep with the resolve that I would not let Galen deceive me any longer, nor persuade me to deceive myself. -- Robin Hobb
she suddenly stood straighter. "He has dismissed me as his Companion, abandoned me just as he did all the other women who loyally served his father as Companions. It is not a shameful distinction. That he has done so speaks of who he is, not what I am."
p. 766: Serilla -- Robin Hobb
It was as if he were so isolated that any close contact at all became a friendship in his mind. -- Robin Hobb
I've thought of ending my life, Fool. I admit it. But always, no matter the damage to it, the body tries to go on. And if it manages to, then the mind follows it. Eventually, -- Robin Hobb
Only my pain is more silent than my anger. -- Robin Hobb
Her stillness was such a contrast to all the jumbled communication inside me that I suddenly felt what a tiresome fellow I was, always filling the air with the rattle of words and anxieties. -- Robin Hobb
When the bee to the earth does fall, the butterfly comes back to change all. -- Robin Hobb
It is worse than useless to do things halfway Bee, for then you think the work is done, but someone must come behind you later to do it all over again. Even if you must work much harder and get less done, it is better to do the whole task the first time. -- Robin Hobb
I became a slightly daft traveler, obsessed with beekeeping and professing to know all there was to know on the topic. I started arguments so others would correct me and speak of beekeepers they had known. -- Robin Hobb
I've returned and I look around me and think, I've missed my life. While I was off and alone, it went on here, without me, and I'm forever doomed to be a stranger in my own home. -- Robin Hobb
The ship's knowledge extended to navigation, to the handling of weather and awareness of necessary maintenance. -- Robin Hobb
It was better to leave the space empty of words than to choose the wrong ones. -- Robin Hobb
There is a saying from the Southlands that there is truth in wine. There must be a bit of it in ale, also. -- Robin Hobb
We were one thing. A whole thing. You and I and Nighteyes. I felt a strange sort of peace. As if all the parts of me were finally in one place. All the missing bits that would make me a complete... thing.' I shook my head. 'Words don't read that far. -- Robin Hobb
It is like being two foreigners, trapped in a land we have come to, unable to return to our own, and having only each other to confirm the reality of the place we once lived. -- Robin Hobb
The fight isn't over until you win, Fitz. That's all you have to remember. No matter what the other man thinks. Or the horse. -- Robin Hobb
Time is an unkind teacher, delivering lessons that we learn far too late for them to be useful. -- Robin Hobb
Opinions may have truth in them but that truth must be free of opinions. -- Robin Hobb
Seldom can one hate a person if one understand that person. -- Robin Hobb
Cats do not enjoy being reminded of debts.
Cats don not incur in debts. -- Robin Hobb
It was possible to be homesick for a time, and to be lonely for the only other person who could recall it. -- Robin Hobb
Oh, the power that lurks in the naming of names. -- Robin Hobb
How often does a man know, without question, that he has done well? I do not think it happens often in anyone's life, and it becomes even rarer once one has a child. -- Robin Hobb
We aren't fated to survive, then at least let us fight it to the end. Let it be fate that extinguishes us, not our own lack of heart. -- Robin Hobb
It was as if I had been following a narrow trail, and had suddenly realized that at any time I could leave it and strike out cross-country. -- Robin Hobb
The fire of my burning past sent odd shadows snaking ahead of us as we made our way into the storm's resurgence. -- Robin Hobb
Any future can be!" she replied, laughing at me. "If it were not so, if it were fixed, it would be a past. You say a foolish thing. How can a future be impossible? -- Robin Hobb
Horns not grown, he swings his head in warning and still all take heed. -- Robin Hobb
Leave old pains alone. When they cease coming to call, do not invite them back. -- Robin Hobb
Finally realizing that life was to be lived, rather than hoarded against an unseen tomorrow. -- Robin Hobb
The greatest danger is always the one we are ignorant of. -- Robin Hobb
I sleep like an old woman now, she thought to herself. In fits and starts. It isn't sleeping and it isn't waking and it isn't rest. -- Robin Hobb
Suspense was an excellent tool for keeping powerful people off balance. It gave one bargaining power. -- Robin Hobb
Did you feel that?' I asked him.
He smiled sadly. 'Fitz, I have never needed to touch you to feel that. It was always there. No limits. -- Robin Hobb
I could not make it right, but I could make someone pay for how wrong it had been. -- Robin Hobb
At what point is a person old enough to say, 'I own my body, and I get to do what I want with it'? -- Robin Hobb
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? -- Robin Hobb
Fantasy is my genre and my home in the writing world. I consider it the biggest writing room in all literature, where there are literally no boundaries at all. -- Robin Hobb
Still I promise myself, "Next time I will do better" in the all-too-human conceit that I will always be offered a "next time. -- Robin Hobb
much that would affect their attitude toward our quest? -- Robin Hobb
And the world re-ordered itself around me. I spoke each word carefully. 'You are so stupid. -- Robin Hobb
Fishing and ear scratching the two reasons men were given hands. -- Robin Hobb
Dragons don't bother with introductions. -- Robin Hobb
I don't want to have these burdens. But I can't bear to turn them over to anyone else, either. Because, despite all the work, I like being in control of my own life. -- Robin Hobb
Clerres is the heart of the world, and the heartbeat of the world must always be steady. -- Robin Hobb
Love can exist without need -- Robin Hobb
In your conceit and aggression, you wage wars and slay one another over the lines you have imagined on the world's face. -- Robin Hobb
Never do what you can't undo until you've considered well what you can't do once you've done it. -- Robin Hobb
But if she let go of her anger, all that would remain was grief and pain. Anger was easier. Anger could be focused outward. Grief corroded from within. -- Robin Hobb
The look I wore must have shocked her, for she turned her gaze back to Lord Golden. She spoke uncertainly. Amber, my friend. Aren't you glad to see me? -- Robin Hobb
It is the way of the young to accept the debilitations of old age very gracefully on behalf of their elderly parents. And -- Robin Hobb
Silence can ask all the questions, where the tongue is prone to ask only the wrong one. -- Robin Hobb
As dye soaks fibres, drawn into them to change their colour forever, so does a memory, stinging or sweet, change the fibre of a man's character. -- Robin Hobb
Yet, all things must pass, but especially time, and with the months and then the years, I came slowly to have a place in the scheme of things. -- Robin Hobb
As you will, King Fitz. -- Robin Hobb
So, with all the wide world to choose from, you didn't choose at all. You simply stopped wandering one day -- Robin Hobb
You can be the dead fish. I'll be the old stick -- Robin Hobb
Death is always less painful and easier than life! You speak true. And yet we do not, day to day, choose death. Because ultimately, death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Death is what you get when there are no choices left to make. Am I right? -- Robin Hobb
But if she is alone now, it is because she chose to be alone, not someone decree if for her. Her life is hers to live, not yours to repair. -- Robin Hobb
When one has been disappointed for so long, hope becomes the enemy. One cannot be dashed to the earth unless one is lifted first, and I learned to avoid hope. -- Robin Hobb
The truth, I discovered, is a tree that grows as a man gains access to experience. A child sees the acorn of his daily life, but a man looks back on the oak. -- Robin Hobb
I could almost see the resignation on the old man's face. I knew he would draw a breath and sigh that I insisted on stacking all my pain in one pile, facing it all at once."
p. 480 Fitz about Chade -- Robin Hobb
Assassins take no pride in fighting fairly. We take pride in winning. -- Robin Hobb
His cracked lips moved.
Beloved.
He couldn't say the word, but I knew it.
And so did his Fool. -- Robin Hobb
And like a child, I'd be testing the people who loved me, pulling away from them almost for the sole reason of seeing if anyone would come after me. -- Robin Hobb
As long as you believe it is impossible, you close your mind to understanding it. -- Robin Hobb
There is no such thing as an extraordinary coincidence. There is only destiny. -- Robin Hobb
Perhaps having the courage to find a better path is having the courage to risk making new mistakes. -- Robin Hobb
Looked a bit better, but her pain was still evident on her face. I watched -- Robin Hobb
I was almost annoyed at her for spoiling my perfectly good sulk. -- Robin Hobb
There is something about you, Etta. Something in you that cannot be quenched, by hardship or ill treatment. Your soul gleams like silver beneath a patina of hard use. He is right to love you. Any man would love you. -- Robin Hobb
Do you think you're taking Etta out of here?"
"Yes," Kennit called over his shoulder up the sairs.
"What about all these dead men?" she shrieked after him as they strode out of her house.
"Those you may keep," Kennit replied. -- Robin Hobb
As well to clutch at the moon's reflection in a still midnight pond as to seek a grip on that bright mind. -- Robin Hobb
Many will rant and rave against the garment fate has woven for them, but they pick it up and don it all the same, and most wear it to the end of their days. You ... you would rather go naked into the storm. -- Robin Hobb
Diplomacy is the velvet glove that cloaks the fist of power. -- Robin Hobb
Very little about being a writer is signing an autograph. It's sitting in a room and writing. Getting it out. -- Robin Hobb
The man who worries about what will next be happening to him loses this moment in dread of the next, and poisons the next with pre-judgement. -- Robin Hobb
If all of her was not enough for him, then let him have none of her and seek what he needed elsewhere. -- Robin Hobb
I want to go home,' he muttered as he totered down the road beside me.
'Me, too,' I told him. And yet it was not Buckkeep that came to my mind, but a meadow overlooking the sea, and a girl in bright red skirts who beckoned me. A time, rather than a place. No road led there anymore. -- Robin Hobb
But all fires, of wood or grief, burn down to ashes eventually. -- Robin Hobb
For he was the Fool now, all of Lord Chance and Lady Amber and Lord Golden scraped away by sorrow. He was no one's Beloved now. -- Robin Hobb
True courage is 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, and the messiness, and the inconvenience of doing what is right.' She -- Robin Hobb
Jek is too busy living. She won't waste time on regrets. -- Robin Hobb
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. -- Robin Hobb
I'll be teaching you the nasty, furtive, polite ways to kill people -- Robin Hobb
Don't do what you can't undo, until you've considered what you can't do once you've done it. -- Robin Hobb
I stood for a time, overlooking the calm sea. Under the bright morning sun, it looked like hammered blue metal. A very light breeze came off it and stirred my hair. I felt as if someone had spoken words aloud to me and I echoed them. "Time for a change."
p. 103 -- Robin Hobb
Perhaps the greatest thing one can discover is that you can decide who you are. You don't have to be whom the Ludlucks made you. You don't even have to be who you were before that. You can choose. We are all creatures of our own devising. -- Robin Hobb
You steal the now of my life away, when you constantly fear that tomorrow will bring my death. Your fears clutch cold at me and snatch all my pleasure in the day's warmth from me. As -- Robin Hobb
He longed for cleanliness and tidiness: it was hard to find peace in the middle of disorder. -- Robin Hobb
Surprise!-FitzChivalry -- Robin Hobb
Having something explained to you does not always solve it. -- Robin Hobb
Understanding how or why is seldom as useful as understanding that things are. -- Robin Hobb
Since then, she had wondered if it were strength or a sort of madness that let her pretend she was normal. -- Robin Hobb
I was lonely, and a lonely heart has hungers that can overpower both common sense and dignity. -- Robin Hobb
I passed that day in pleasure, which is to say, in the sort of work I wanted to do rather than the work that I thought I ought to be doing. -- Robin Hobb
Not being able to think of a reply is not the same thing as accepting another's words. -- Robin Hobb
Is it the nature of the world that all things seek a rhythm, and in that rhythm a sort o peace? -- Robin Hobb
I think there have always been male writers, female writers. As a reader, I never picked up a book and said, 'Oh, I can't read this - it's about a male,' and set it back down. -- Robin Hobb
Amber?" he said pleadingly. His voice went high on her name and broke, as it sometimes did when he was afraid. "Are you taking my beads away? -- Robin Hobb
I tried to unbelieve that it had happened, to force time back by sheer effort of will. -- Robin Hobb
He lives day-to-day now, just as we do, fumbling forward down the path to the future. -- Robin Hobb
I have been in howling storms in which a shout is reduced to a whisper, moved across the sea's featureless face in a gray fog that does not yield to human eyes. -- Robin Hobb
Better to regret unsaid words than repent of words I could never call back. Who -- Robin Hobb
Silent," the carved wizardwood on his wrist breathed. "Silent as a blinded ship, floating hull-up in the sea. Silent as a scream underwater. -- Robin Hobb
Some people say 'I want to be a writer,' and some people say, 'I want to write.' -- Robin Hobb
When you want a thing so badly for so long, and then it comes time to face that you cannot have it, sometimes - '
'Sometimes you can't believe it when it comes to you. Sometimes you're afraid to believe it. I understand your hesitation. -- Robin Hobb
Dragon droppings? Per asked in awe, as if that were the most fantastic part of their tale. -- Robin Hobb
There is no more slippery task than to refrain from thinking of something. -- Robin Hobb
Sometimes a man doesn't know how badly he's hurt until someone else probes the wound. -- Robin Hobb
I think it's really hard to draw a hard-and-fast line and say 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' doesn't count as science fiction or fantasy. Or at what point do we say mythology is not fantasy, so reading mythology when you're young does not count as an exposure to fantasy? -- Robin Hobb
One must plan for the future and anticipate the future without fearing the future. -- Robin Hobb
Do not agonize about yesterday. Do not borrow tomorrow's trouble. Let your heart hunt. Rest in the now. -- Robin Hobb
Now, anyone with two thoughts in their mind can see that no future is set in stone. An infinite number of futures bud at the end of every moment, and each one of them can be changed by a falling rose petal. -- Robin Hobb
Fitz: Shall we get up tomorrow and go looking for a wild pig?
Nighteyes: I didn't lose any wild pigs, did you? -- Robin Hobb
Isolation was better than shame. I would continue on my own. This was my fight and no one else -- Robin Hobb
Somewhere in the back of my mind, Nighteyes was frantic. 'Poisoned. That water is poisoned.' I couldn't frame a thought to reassure him. -- Robin Hobb
The wisest man takes the shortest path to peace with himself. -- Robin Hobb
I was as foolish as I had ever been, no, even stupider, for the gullibility of a boy is fatuousness in a man. -- Robin Hobb
There are always choices. But sometimes there are no good ones. -- Robin Hobb
For six nights, this nightmare has howled through my sleep, a dire warning. -- Robin Hobb
Despite my pain, I felt not the regret of an ending, but the foreboding of a beginning. -- Robin Hobb
Boredom is vastly underrated. Boredom means that nothing is trying to kill you every day. -- Robin Hobb
It doesn't matter who a man's father is. Your parents made a child, but it's up to you to make the man you'll be. -- Robin Hobb
When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool you end up looking like a moron instead. -- Robin Hobb
Not every problem in the world belongs to you. -- Robin Hobb
He smiled, and reminded me that no man could make time, but only use that which he was given wisely. -- Robin Hobb
You've the saddest song of any man I've ever known. The -- Robin Hobb
The fight isn't over until you win. -- Robin Hobb
He is very concerned with his dignity, and I think that prevents him from having an interesting life. If I were a boy, and permitted to have an interesting life, I would have no dignity at all. -- Robin Hobb
Sometimes it seemed to me a cruelty that so much was unresolved between us; at other times, a blessing that a hope of reunion lingered. -- Robin Hobb
In politics, appearance matters more than truth. -- Robin Hobb
Well. Who wouldn't break? I broke. You broke.'
'And we both emerged stronger.'
'We both emerged', I modified his words. -- Robin Hobb
Dragons. A sky full of dragons. -- Robin Hobb
Fantasy encompasses a wide, wide spectrum of writing. We have beast fables, we have gothics, we have tales of vampires and werewolves, and we have sword and sorcery; we have epics from Homer, and there is just so much out there that we put under the umbrella of 'fantasy.' -- Robin Hobb
A man has to have a purpose in life. I know this now, but it took me the first score years of my life to learn it. In that I scarcely think myself unique. -- Robin Hobb
All men value their own secrets far above those of others. -- Robin Hobb
Regrets are useless, " the Fool replied. "All you can do is start from where you are. -- Robin Hobb
Tomorrow owes you the sum of your yesterdays. No more than that. And no less. -- Robin Hobb
The man who must brag for himself knows that no one else will -- Robin Hobb
There are endings. There are beginnings. Sometimes they coincide, with the ending of one thing marking the beginning of another. But sometimes there is simply a long space after an ending, a time when it seems everything has ended and nothing else can ever begin. -- Robin Hobb
I wondered if there was any way to live amongst other people and refuse to be harnessed by their expectations and dependencies. -- Robin Hobb
Even if you do only a little damage, they will learn that touching you has a price. Some will not be willing to pay it. I -- Robin Hobb
Do you not see how strange and wonderful that is? That all history balances on an affair of the human heart? -- Robin Hobb
Or do you think that a man must first become perfect before he can do good? -- Robin Hobb
Some part of me knew that was important. That once it would have mattered terribly to me. -- Robin Hobb
You'll do well, if you don't mire in self-pity. Self-pity only gets you more of the same. Don't waste time on it. -- Robin Hobb
I actually think that short stories transfer to film much better than novels do. -- Robin Hobb
Think of what is and don't let what might have been distract you. -- Robin Hobb
A woman of many talents. And intelligent, too. He'd probably have to kill her soon. -- Robin Hobb
It is hard to write down a story that has no sequence or sense, let alone make a picture of what my dream showed me. -- Robin Hobb
Silence keeps a secret. I understand.' I -- Robin Hobb
A simple question unlocks best. -- Robin Hobb
I had moved on to another life. I could not expect the old one to be held ajar for me forever. -- Robin Hobb
We who serve the Servants aid them to keep that heart beating steadily. -- Robin Hobb
Oh, and you accuse me of flattery! Here I waddle about like a fat old duck and you try to tell me I'm lovely. -- Robin Hobb
Fitz fixes fyces fitz.Fatsafices. -- Robin Hobb
Anticipating pain was like enduring it twice. Why not anticipate pleasure instead? -- Robin Hobb
Locked into loneliness were we two and looking at one another every evening we each saw the one we blamed for it. -- Robin Hobb
There is power in the keeping of a secret, and power in the revelation of a secret. Sometimes it takes very wise man to discern which is the path to greater power. -- Robin Hobb
Sometimes, when one goes back to the scene of one's childhood, things seem smaller. What was mysterious and the sole province of adults suddenly seems commonplace and mundane when viewed with mature eyes. -- Robin Hobb
My father had already forgotten him. He had suddenly -- Robin Hobb
When you see me loyal to my family, then you see the wolf. -- Robin Hobb
When you spring to an idea, and decide it is truth, without evidence, you blind yourself to other possibilities. -- Robin Hobb
Some calls you cannot ignore, no matter how it may tear your heart. -- Robin Hobb
How different would our perception of reality be if ... we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams? -- Robin Hobb
In the dead of night I stirred. Wakefulness flowed back into me. I was a cup full of sorrow, but that sorrow was stilled, like a pain that abates as long as one does not move. -- Robin Hobb
Somehow," she said coldly, "you have confused profitable and not profitable for right and wrong. I, however, have not. -- Robin Hobb
You must be taught the Skill, boy," he said as if it were a decision painfully come by. "Evil times have come to us, and they will be with us for a long time. It is a time when good men must create whatever weapons they can. -- Robin Hobb
We did hard things for each other. Risked our lives. Gave up our lives and faced death, and then faced life again. You might be surprised to find that facing life can be much harder than facing death. -- Robin Hobb
shall." I think I finally guessed then what -- Robin Hobb
There were times when taking vengeance for the dead seemed too high a price for abandoning the living. I -- Robin Hobb
Die in your dreams, wake up insane. -- Robin Hobb
None of us ever know what we are choosing when we choose life. If certainty is so important to you, than you should have chosen to be dead. That is a certain thing. -- Robin Hobb
To finally confront the worst there is, to look it squarely in the face and say, I know you. You have hurt me, almost to death, but still I live. And I will go on living. -- Robin Hobb
There are moments that change the course of one's lifetime, and often we don't realize how significant those initial may be until years pass. -- Robin Hobb
When you let go and follow your fate instead of trying to twist your life around and master it, a man finds that happiness follows him. -- Robin Hobb
He created reality around himself, bringing order and peace to a small island of warm firelight and the simple smell of hearth bread cooking. -- Robin Hobb
Name it as you will, claim it as you will, the world does not belong to men. Men belong to the world. -- Robin Hobb
I have never been wise. -- Robin Hobb
We are as we are. How can you claim to know what life I was meant to lead, let alone threaten to force me into it? All your quibbling is nonsense. As well forbid your nose to snuff, or your ears to hear. We are as we do. -- Robin Hobb
And a Fool is supposed to be wise? -- Robin Hobb
To sate your need without love is theft -- Robin Hobb
Your future. It awaits only you, to live it and to write it. -- Robin Hobb
Coming up. A large tawny cat announced this to me at the same moment that he effortlessly elevated onto my lap. I stared at him in surprise. -- Robin Hobb
Is time the wheel that turns, or the track it leaves behind? -- Robin Hobb
The fight isn't over until you win it, Fitz. That's all you have to remember. No matter what the other man says. -- Robin Hobb
The fight isn't over until you win it ... That's all you have to remember. No matter what the other man thinks. -- Robin Hobb
This is a day for things to break, he thought. My heart. The fellowship of the folk who had come here together. We all move apart from one another today. -- Robin Hobb
King Shrewd is expecting me, rather he isn't expecting me, and that is precisely why I must go to him now. -- Robin Hobb
It is a sense you do not possess, and hence I cannot explain it to you," she added condescendingly. "Imagine trying to explain a sense of smell to someone who had none. What sounds like an arbitrary, almost mystic ability is no different from smelling apple blossoms in the dark. -- Robin Hobb
I think that my passion for writing fantasy began at about the same time as my passion for reading fantasy. -- Robin Hobb
The betrayal of a friend differs from the treachery of a lover only in the degree of pain, not the kind. -- Robin Hobb
How could the whole world not be as broken as I was? -- Robin Hobb
Justice. There's a thing we shall ever thirst after, and ever be parched. No. We content ourselves with law. -- Robin Hobb
I was very tired of being hit, but it seemed like the one thing I did well lately. -- Robin Hobb
It is an odd language, yours. You speak of passing time as in the Mountains we speak of passing wind. As if it were a thing to be gotten rid of. -- Robin Hobb
Sound seemed muted, and night darker, scent and taste dulled. It was as if the world had been robbed of its brightness. He had left me behind to dwell alone in a dimmed and stale place. -- Robin Hobb
Have you ever suddenly realized that there was someone you loved, but presently did not like very much? -- Robin Hobb
Perhaps once one realised how deeply one could bond with a creature as foreign as a dragon, all forms of human love seemed more acceptable. -- Robin Hobb
Oh, the things we discover and the things we learn, much too late. Worse are the secrets that are not secrets, the sorrows we live with but do not admit to one another. -- Robin Hobb
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.
-- Robin Hobb
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. -- Robin Hobb
Refuse anxiety. When you borrow trouble against what might be, you neglect the moment you have now to enjoy. The man who worries about what will next be happening to him loses this moment in dread of the next with pre-judgement -- Robin Hobb
It doesn't work that way. Silencing memories does not make them stop existing. Events cannot be undone by forgetting them. -- Robin Hobb
Kyle saw them as a double-pronged problem: the ship that would not heed his wishes because of a boy that would not be what his father commanded him to be. -- Robin Hobb
Be careful with your beak,' I chided her. She turned her shining eyes on me. 'I am careful, stupid Fitz. -- Robin Hobb
Why must it be one or the other?' she countered. 'You are both a capable seaman and the son of a Bingtown Trader. Why should not I have both sets of skill? -- Robin Hobb
Fitz!' Motley greeted me. 'Hello, stupid!' she added. The -- Robin Hobb
Death could make things stop, but it could not make things right. -- Robin Hobb
To me there was no catharsis, only an unearthing of rotting corpses of memories, a baring og still suppurating wounds. -- Robin Hobb
I don't know"
"When a man says that, it usually means, "No, I won't but from time to time, I'll toy with the idea, so I can pretend i eventually intend to do it. -- Robin Hobb
THE HEIR OF NIGHT by Helen Lowe is a richly told tale of strange magic, dark treachery and conflicting loyalties, set in a well realized world. -- Robin Hobb
The same thing I love for are the things I would die for. -- Robin Hobb
You always chose to be bound by who you are. Now choose to be freed by who you are. -- Robin Hobb
It made me wish there were a place as much me as that place is you. A place I would keep as secret. -- Robin Hobb
She is dead. Dead so many years. Who could imagine that death lasts so much longer than life? -- Robin Hobb
What good is a life lived as if it made no difference at all to the great life of the world? -- Robin Hobb
I know you think me foolish, but then, I am the Fool. You know then I must be Foolish. -- Robin Hobb
That is one thing that in all my years among your folk I have never become accustomed to. The great importance that you attach to what gender one is. -- Robin Hobb
Acceptance of what is. That is the shortest path to peace with yourself. -- Robin Hobb
A boy is a man when he proves himself to be one, but a girl is a woman when she desires to be one. -- Robin Hobb
We didn't have to share a mind to share a heart. -- Robin Hobb
I do not know whom I wish to win; until I do, I will let no player be eliminated. -- Robin Hobb
A bed unslept, and a woman unbedded. The bed is yours by right, but the woman, though she may come to you in time, never completely belongs to you. Yet the child is yours, for the child belongs not to who makes him but to he who takes him. -- Robin Hobb
Yet I desperately wanted to share the news, as if grief were a heavy burden to be spread out among those who must bear it. -- Robin Hobb
I had no idea what to do with this unexpected life. -- Robin Hobb
It was, after all, a time for heroes and all sorts of marvelous things to occur. -- Robin Hobb
My brother! Nighteyes greeted me joyously. -- Robin Hobb
Never pretend we are anything but what we are. Assassins. -- Robin Hobb
People are intimidated by a man who acts with no apparent regard for consequences. Behave as if you cannot be touched and no one will dare to touch you. -- Robin Hobb
Humans could never accept the world as it was and live in it. They were always breaking it and living among the shattered pieces. -- Robin Hobb
My silences he mistook for a lack of wit rather than a lack of any need to speak. -- Robin Hobb
Is there nothing private anymore?" "Only the things we keep from ourselves," she replied sadly. She -- Robin Hobb
Do not pull back from the pain and imagine that makes you strong. Look at it, you dolt! It is trying to tell you what is wrong so you can fix it. -- Robin Hobb
Much insight into himself could have been gained from contemplation of these things, but Wintrow reined his mind away from it. Perhaps he did not want to know himself quite that well."
p. 543 -- Robin Hobb
History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took. -- Robin Hobb
Nothing takes the heart out of a man more than the expectation of failure. -- Robin Hobb
Oh, my boy. The best mistake Chivalry ever made was you. Go on now. -- Robin Hobb
I was amazed at how strong women were when they were angry. -- Robin Hobb
I wanted us to share all our lives. You wish to keep me in a box, separate from your life. I cannot be someone you come to when you have nothing more important to do. -- Robin Hobb
Truth can well out of a man like blood from a wound, and it can be just as disconcerting to look at. -- Robin Hobb
Undeserved forgiveness. Friendship defined. -- Robin Hobb
But a living is not a life. -- Robin Hobb
Sometimes thanking someone is more important to the person giving the thanks than the one who receives it. -- Robin Hobb
Wolves have no kings. -- Robin Hobb
Too late to apologize. I have already forgiven you. -- Robin Hobb
Dragons, to my way of thinking, are just another 'race' of sapient characters. We see lots of elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, giants and, of course, dragons. -- Robin Hobb
Why does the forbidden always add that edge of sweetness? -- Robin Hobb
It is a heady thing to be suddenly proclaimed the center of someone's world, -- Robin Hobb
He has had his wish. He will not bow his head. [after a dragon chomped off someone's head] -- Robin Hobb
No man is so dangerous as the man who cannot decide what he fears. -- Robin Hobb
I have said it before. You are too cautious, Fitz. What if this, what if that? You hide from trouble that may never knock at our door. -- Robin Hobb
We are here, Fitz, you and I, to change the future of the world. To reach out and hold in place the tiny pebble that could trigger the boulder's tumbling. -- Robin Hobb
She knew, with vast certainty, that she would never desire to be kissed by a man who had first asked her permission. -- Robin Hobb
The Golden Dawn was the first figurehead to take on life. -- Robin Hobb
If you don't decide what you will do with the rest of your life, someone else will decide it for you. -- Robin Hobb
The word of a cat is not to be relied upon. -- Robin Hobb
There was, she suddenly saw, many ways to be raped. -- Robin Hobb
Keeping a child from harm is not the same as rearing one. -- Robin Hobb
Shame is not a good emotion for a man to feel. It makes him angry as often as it makes him sorry. -- Robin Hobb
My head cleared, and suddenly I had heart to fight again, to ignore pain and damage, to fight! I swear I saw myself, face purpled from strangling, the rich blood streaming and soaking and the smell so maddening. -- Robin Hobb
When she spoke his name, Beloved, he believed she meant it. He spoke of an adolescence I envied. Pampered, praised, educated . . . any child's dream. But we all awake from dreams. -- Robin Hobb
I was dying. And I had never been enough for anything. -- Robin Hobb
Open your eyes. This horrible mess is your life. There is no sense in waiting for it to get better. Stop putting it off and live it. -- Robin Hobb
My perception of my life crashed from high tragedy to juvenile self-pity in a matter of moments. -- Robin Hobb
That no man can truly imagine being happy and that's why happiness isn't for sale here. -- Robin Hobb
Did you see how she stood and faced them down? I demanded with pride. A most excellent bitch, Nighteyes agreed. -- Robin Hobb
All of life, I wanted to tell him, is in our minds. Where else does it take place, where else do we add up what it means to us and subtract what we have lost? An event is just an event until some person attaches meaning to it. -- Robin Hobb
Isn't it strange how wise counsel can cool the hottest head? -- Robin Hobb
I should live each day as if it were significant, as if everyday the fate of the world depended on my action. -- Robin Hobb
Boys, I decided, simply have a given amount of rudeness they must express. -- Robin Hobb
The days we shared I alone would remember now.
I suddenly felt less real. -- Robin Hobb
I accepted their ridicule by sulking manfully. -- Robin Hobb
The carriageway to the front door was wide, and graceful white birches lined it. In autumn they shed a carpet of gold on the road, and in winter, burdened with snow, they arched over it, a frosted white tunnel paned with glimpses of blue sky. -- Robin Hobb
Bastard, she spat at him, and she thought he had moved closer. She swung at him, and then suddenly he was where he had been standing all along, the coward. -- Robin Hobb
I think I made a better boy than I do a man, I admitted ruefully to the wolf.
Why not wait until you've been at it a bit longer and then decide? he suggested. -- Robin Hobb
When both my editors say 'This is really bad, you need to change this,' I ignore that at my peril. -- Robin Hobb
I told you it was foolish. But feelings do not have to be wise. Feelings just are. -- Robin Hobb
It was an impressive display of good food abused in the name of fashionable cooking. -- Robin Hobb
You never miss the water until the well runs dry. -- Robin Hobb
Work, the old people say, keeps a man young. But perhaps that is something old folk say just because they know they must go on working. -- Robin Hobb
Some speak of the savagery of beasts. I will ever prefer that to the thoughtless contempt some men have toward animals. -- Robin Hobb
They also found the cocooned dragons. They had no idea that was what they were, of course. They thought ... who knows what they thought at first? Perhaps they seemed like massive sections of tree trunks. So they refer to it: wizardwood. -- Robin Hobb
A moment ago you spoke of love without need. To sate your need without love is theft. If you ust have that, hire it done. -- Robin Hobb
There are few things so tender as a man's dignity. -- Robin Hobb
The loneliness that can never be filled by anyone except the one whose loss created the absence; -- Robin Hobb
Somewhere inside me, a madman raged in his cell, but I chose not to know of that. -- Robin Hobb
A secret is only yours so long as you don't share it. Tell it to one person, and it's a secret no more. -- Robin Hobb
Once she would have found him mysterious and alluring. She had grown wiser. Dangerous men were neither romantic nor exotic; they were men who could hurt you. -- Robin Hobb
She was a dragon, not a mindless mud salamander. -- Robin Hobb
There is little in life so reassuring as a genuine welcome. -- Robin Hobb
Girls think strangely, -- Robin Hobb
Perhaps the only thing about him that had been remarkable was that he had been given a chance. -- Robin Hobb
But he became known as a bad luck ship, mockingly called the Pariah. -- Robin Hobb
Take all self-determination from a man's life, and all that is left for him to do is complain. -- Robin Hobb
If I had a dog that was sick as often as you are, I'd put it down, he observed kindly. -- Robin Hobb
When you cut pieces from the truth to avoid sounding like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead. -- Robin Hobb
Perhaps the gods punish us by bringing us face to face with our own foolish mistakes, condemning us to watch our children fall into the same traps that crippled us. -- Robin Hobb
Artists and whores, gold always bought them. An artist was no more than a whore who had been well paid. 'Come -- Robin Hobb
Very little worth knowing is taught by fear. -- Robin Hobb
I am the King's Fool. He is the King-In-Wating. Let him wait. -- Robin Hobb
I wasn't being fair to expect those things of him. But life wasn't fair. Life does not wait for any of us to grow up. -- Robin Hobb
Had she learned to feel again, only to have to feel this? Could any amount of love ever be worth the pain of losing it? -- Robin Hobb
When had it become so ingrained in her to apologize whenever she wanted something for herself? -- Robin Hobb
You imagine the worst, and when you do, your mind stops at the problem and does not consider the solution. -- Robin Hobb
And saw Nosy and I flee. -- Robin Hobb