Robin Hobb Famous Quotes
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Your future. It awaits only you, to live it and to write it.
Does anything feel worse than being angry with people you love?"
"P. 307: Fitz to Chade
From their midst a broad-shouldered man stepped forth, past Longwick, who tried vainly to motion him back. He ran three strides toward me, and I took a deep, unbelieving breath of his scent just before he enfolded me in a bear hug. Despite the pain to my shoulder, I didn't struggle. I dropped my head on his shoulder, and let him support me, feeling safer than I had in years. Suddenly, it seemed as if everything would be all right, as if everything could be mended. Heart of the Pack was here and he never let us come to harm.
When settled people look for security, they look for continuity." Here
Don't go mooning after the stars, when the wide sea is all around you. It's a sky of its own, you know.
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?
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.
Too much on my mind. Too many directions to think in all at once. I sometimes feel that if I had time to focus my mind on just one problem, I could solve it. And then go on to solve the others." "Every man believes that. It isn't so. Slay the ones you can as they come to hand, and after a while you get used to the ones you can do nothing about.
Wolves have no kings.
It is a heady thing to be suddenly proclaimed the center of someone's world,
You won't even see what is put right on the table before you. Men. If it was raining soup you'd be out there with a fork.
It is common for folk who are not Witted to think that those of us with Old Blood can talk to any animal. We can't. The Wit is a mutual exchange, a sharing of thoughts. Some creatures are more open than others; some cats will not only talk to anyone, but will natter on or nag or pester with absolutely no restraint. Even the person with only the tiniest shred of the Wit will find themselves standing to open the door before the cat has scratched at it, or calling the cat from across the room to share the best morsel of fish.
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.
It's not the kind of work a man does that says he can be proud or not. It's how he does it.
That was Verity's way. MOnths had passed since we had last spoken but he took no times for greetings. Chade said it was a lack in him, that he didn't make his men feel their importance to him. I think he believed that if anything significant had happened to me, someone would have told him. He had a bluff heartiness to him that I enjoyed, an attitude that things must be going well unless someone ahd told him otherwise.
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.
You always chose to be bound by who you are. Now choose to be freed by who you are.
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
Despite my pain, I felt not the regret of an ending, but the foreboding of a beginning.
shall." I think I finally guessed then what
What is a secret? It is much more than knowledge shared with only a few, or perhaps only one another. It is power. It is a bond. It is a sign of deep trust, or the darkest threat possible.
There is power in the keeping of a secret, and power in the revelation of a secret. Sometimes it takes a very wise man to discern which is the path to greater power.
All men desirous of power should become collectors of secrets. There is no secret too small to be valuable. All men value their own secrets far above those of others. A scullery maid may be willing to betray a prince before allowing the name of her secret lover to be told.
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
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.
When people look most vicious, what you are seeing is not their animal side. It is the savagery that only humans can muster.
But in my heart, when I said "my king," I meant Verity.
Much later that night, as he meditated in forgiveness of the day, he wondered at himself. Had not he laughed at cruelty, had not his smile condoned the degradation of another human being? Where was Sa in that? Guilt washed over him. He forced it aside; a true priest of Sa had little use for guilt. It but obscured; if something made a man feel bad then he must determine what about it troubled him, and eliminate that. Simply to suffer the discomforts of guilt did not indicate a man had improved himself, only that he suspected he harbored a fault. He lay still in the darkness and pondered what had made him smile and why. And for the first time in many years, he wondered if his conscience was not too tender, if it had not become a barrier between him and his fellows. "That which separates is not of Sa," he said softly to himself. But he fell asleep before he could remember the source for the quote, or even it if were from scripture at all.
p. 313
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.
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.
Keeping a child from harm is not the same as rearing one.
This was a young man who had killed, but never before been in imminent danger of being killed. I felt oddly qualified to introduce him to the sensation.
There is a peculiar strength that comes to one who is facing the final battle. That battle is not limited to war, nor the strength to warriors. I've seen this strength in old women with the coughing sickness and heard of it in families that are starving together. It drives one to go on, past hope or despair, past blood loss and gut wounds, past death itself in a final surge to save something that is cherished. It is courage without hope. During the Red-Ship Wars, I saw a man with blood gouting in spurts from where his left arm had once been yet swinging a sword with his right as he stood protecting a fallen comrade. During one encounter with Forged Ones, I saw a mother stumbling over her own entrails as she shrieked and clutched at a Forged man, trying to hold him away from her daughter.
The OutIslanders have a word for that courage. "Finblead", they call it, the last blood, and they believe that a special fortitude resides in the final blood that remains in a man or a woman before they fall. According to their tales, only then can one find and use that sort of courage.
It is a terrible bravery and at its strongest and worst, it goes on for months when one battles a final illness. Or, I believe, when one moves toward a duty that will result in death but is completely unavoidable. That "finblead" lights everything in one's life with a terrible radiance. All relationships are illuminated for what they are and for what they truly were in the past. All illus
It doesn't work that way. Silencing memories does not make them stop existing. Events cannot be undone by forgetting them.
This terrible event – whatever it was – is over and done. Cling to it and let it shape you and you are doomed to live it forever. You are granting it power over you. Set it aside, and shape your future as you wish it to be, in spite of what happened to you. Then you have seized control of it.
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.
Die in your dreams, wake up insane.
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?
FitzChivalry Farseer, too long have you sojourned among the Elderlings, your memory spurned by the very people you saved. Too long have you been in a place where the months pass as if days. Too long have you walked among us in false guise, deprived of your name and your honor. Rise. Turn and face the folk of the Six Duchies, your folk, and be welcomed home at last.
The sheer improbability of your existence took my breath away.
Acceptance of what is. That is the shortest path to peace with yourself.
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
I was as foolish as I had ever been, no, even stupider, for the gullibility of a boy is fatuousness in a man.
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.
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.
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.
But all fires, of wood or grief, burn down to ashes eventually.
Do not agonize about yesterday. Do not borrow tomorrow's trouble. Let your heart hunt. Rest in the now.
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?
The betrayal of a friend differs from the treachery of a lover only in the degree of pain, not the kind.
Dragons don't bother with introductions.
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.
Why do you chop your life into bits and give the bits names? Hours, days. It is like a rabbit. If I kill a rabit, I eat a rabbit. When you have a rabbit, you chop it up and call it bones and meat and fur and guts. And so you never have enough.
Why does the forbidden always add that edge of sweetness?
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.
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.
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.
He gave a final shake of his coat. I go to the hunt!
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.
Jek is too busy living. She won't waste time on regrets.
There would always be dishonorable things done to preserve the honor of any power.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, Nighteyes was frantic. 'Poisoned. That water is poisoned.' I couldn't frame a thought to reassure him.
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
Elliania wore her cloak of narwhals and bucks, and somehow a doublet that matched it perfectly had been created for the Prince. Dutiful's simple coronet had been replaced with an ornate harvest crown, and in that I saw Chade's subtle hand, for he displayed the Prince as a crowned king before his dukes. Ceremonial it might be, yet it could not fail to leave an impression. Elliania was crowned, as well. Whereas the Prince wore a crown of gilded antlers, hers featured a single narwhal horn enameled in blue and trimmed in silver. When
A dark provider skimmed lazily along above them. As it swept over their heads, it cast forth food for them.
Thinking is not always ... comforting. It is always good, but not always comforting.
To me there was no catharsis, only an unearthing of rotting corpses of memories, a baring og still suppurating wounds.
Then in general charge of the pack beasts and wagon animals. But it wasn't just work he taught me. Cleanliness. Honesty. He put a value on what my mother and grandmother had tried to instill in me so long ago. He showed them to me as a man's values, not just manners for inside a woman's house. He taught me to be a man, not a beast in a man's shape. He made me see it was more than rules, it was a way of being. A life, rather than a living. He
Besides, if there were no dragons of flesh and blood and fire, whence would come the idea for these stone carvings?
So many things were easier to live with if you didn't give them much thought.
p. 28
Very little worth knowing is taught by fear.
We live in our bodies. An assault on that outside fortress of the mind leaves scars that may not show, but never heal.
But there is another type, one who goes about the world cadaverously, cheeks sunken, bones jutting, and one senses that he so disapproves of the whole of the world that he begrudges every bit of it that he takes inside himself. At that moment I would have wagered that Galen had never truly enjoyed one bite of food or one swallow of drink in his life.
About these homes and at the intersections of the roads in this nomadic "city" are the gardens. Each is unique. One may center around an unusually shaped stump or an arrangement of stones or a graceful bit of wood. They may contain fragrant herbs or bright flowers or any combination of plants. One notable one has at its heart a bubbling spring of steaming water. Here grow plants with fleshy leaves and exotically scented flowers, denizens of some warmer clime brought here to delight the Mountain-dwellers with their mystery. Often visitors leave gifts in the gardens when they depart, a wooden carving or a graceful pot or perhaps merely an arrangement of bright pebbles. The gardens belong to no one, and all tend them. At
Had they been dogs they would have sniffed me over and then drawn back. But humans have no such inbred courtesies.
And not only the world but humanity itself does need dragons"
"And why is that?" Chade demanded disdainfully.
"To keep the balance," the Fool replied. He glanced over me, and then past me, out of the window and his eyes went far and pensive. "Humanity fears no rivals. You have forgotten what it was to share the world with creatures as arrogantly superior as yourselves. You think to arrange the world to your liking. So you map the land and draw lines across it, claiming ownership simply because you can draw a picture of it. The plants that grow and the beasts that rove, you mark as your own, claiming not only what lives today, but what might grow tomorrow, to do with as you please. Then, in your conceit and aggression, you wage wars and slay one another over the lines you have imagined on the world's face."
"And I suppose dragons are better than we are because they don't do such things, because they simply take whatever they see. Free spirits, nature's creatures, possessing all the moral loftiness that comes from not being able to think."
The Fool shook his head, smiling. "No. Dragons are no better than humans. They are little different at all from men. They will hold up a mirror to humanity's selfishness. They will remind you that all your talk of owning this and claiming that is no more than the snarling of a chained dog or a sparrow's challenge song. The reality of those claims lasts but for the instant of its sounding. Name it as you will, claim it
I accepted their ridicule by sulking manfully.
I was almost annoyed at her for spoiling my perfectly good sulk.
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.
What good is a life lived as if it made no difference at all to the great life of the world?
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.
Tomorrow owes you the sum of your yesterdays. No more than that. And no less.
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.
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?
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.
There is always power in holding a secret.
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.
Her ambitions have always exceeded her abilities." He paused, and looked directly at Regal. "In royalty, that is a most lamentable failing.
Only my pain is more silent than my anger.
Much discomfort was based on human expectations. As a man, I expected to be warm and dry when I chose to be. Animals did not harbor any such beliefs. So it was raining. That part of me that was wolf could accept that. Rain meant being cold and wet. Once I acknowledged that and stopped comparing it to what I wished it to be, the conditions were far more tolerable.
No. I wanted nothing of that. I sank myself deeper into the stronger current where all such outreaching mingled into a vast joining. Sometimes I thought it the birthplace of dreams and intuitions. At other times I thought of it as a repository of all the folk who had gone before us, and perhaps even those to come after. It was a place where sorrows and joys were equal, where life and death were just the stitches on each side of a quilt. It was nepenthe."
p. 465
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.
Her nakedness was not vulnerability, but armour.
As if he hadn't always known he was loved the best. That he was the Beloved.
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.
The hand that once wielded both sword and axe now aches after an evening of the quill. When I wipe the tip of one clean, I often wonder how many buckets of ink I have used in a lifetime. How many words have I set down on paper or vellum, thinking to trap the truth thereby? And of those words, how many have I myself consigned to the flames as worthless and wrong? I do as I have done so many times. I write, I sand the wet ink, I consider my own words. Then I burn them. Perhaps when I do so, the truth goes up the chimney as smoke. Is it destroyed, or set free in the world? I do not know. I
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.
I think that old magic draws much of its strength from that acknowledgment: that we are a part of that world.
Opinions may have truth in them but that truth must be free of opinions.
His heart had pounded with joy at the thought that he might catch her, might playfully hold her in his arms, for just a moment. They were children, I suddenly saw, children at play, only a handful of years older than I was now. They had never grown older, neither one of them, not really. All their lives she had remained that girl to him, that wondrous girl just a few years older than he was, but so worldly wise, so female to all that was so male in his life.
Some secrets beg to be betrayed. The secret of undeclared love is like that.
I was the Fool and the Fool was me. He was the Catalyst and so was I. We were two halves of a whole, sundered and come together again. For an instant I knew him in his entirety, complete and magical, and then he was pulling apart from me, laughing, a bubble inside me, separate and unknowable, yet joined to me. "You do love me !" I was incredulous. He had never truly believed it before. "Before, it was words. I always feared it war born of pity. But you are truly my friend. This is knowing. This is feeling what you feel for me. So this is the Skill". For a moment he reveled in simple recognition.