Quotes from 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.

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.

But all fires, of wood or grief, burn down to ashes eventually.

We all perish in our last attempt to live.

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.

Cruelty is a skill taught not only by example, but also by experience of it.

Despite my pain, I felt not the regret of an ending, but the foreboding of a beginning.

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.

I once knew of a minstrel who bragged of having had a thousand women, one time each. He would never know what I knew, that to have one woman a thousand times, and each time find in her a different delight, is far better. I knew now what gleamed in the eyes of old couples when they stared at each other across a room...My familiarity with her was a more potent love elixir than any potion sold by a hedge-witch in the market.

It's a change, and I don't like changes, especially changes I don't understand.' 'Life is change,' the Fool observed lacidly. 'And death is an even greater change. I think we must resign ourselves to change, Fitz.' 'I'm tired of resigning myself to things. My entire life has been one long resignation.

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.

Little Brother, do not treat me as if I am already dead, or dying. If you see me that way, then I would rather truly be dead. 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.

You are not a man as ordinary men are. They think they have a right to all beasts; to hunt them and eat them, or to subjugate them and rule their lives. You know you have no such right to mastery. The horse that carries you will do so because he wishes to, as does the wolf that hunts beside you. You have a deeper sense of yourself in the world. You believe you have a right, not to rule it, but to be part of it. Predator or prey; there is no shame to being either one.

Just tell me. Do I break the future? -Oh, child. We all do. That is both the danger and the hope of life. That each of us changes the world, every day.

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.

Well. Who wouldn't break? I broke. You broke.' 'And we both emerged stronger.' 'We both emerged', I modified his words.

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.

We were both smiling, in that bittersweet way one does when imagining something the heart longs for and the head would dread.

That's how it's done, Trell. You break your heart against this stony world. You fling yourself at it, on the side of good, and you do not ask the cost. That's how you do it.

A message is not delivered until it is understood.

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.

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.

I tried to unbelieve that it had happened, to force time back by sheer effort of will.

But in my heart, when I said "my king," I meant Verity.