Quotes from Robin Hobb

The word of a cat is not to be relied upon.

I can take all my pasts, keep them and determine my own future. I don't have to be what anyone made me, Brashen. I can be Paragon.

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.

She wears a freedom ring in one ear, you know, the earring that Chalcedean freed-slaves must purchase and wear to prove they have been granted their freedom. I asked her once if she had bought her freedom, or if it had belonged to her mother. She was quiet for a time, and then said it was a gift from her one true love.

Name it as you will, claim it as you will, the world does not belong to men. Men belong to the world.

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.

Her nakedness was not vulnerability, but armour.

There can be no misunderstandings if there are no understandings at all.

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.

Since then, she had wondered if it were strength or a sort of madness that let her pretend she was normal.

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.

you imagine the worst, and when you do, your mind stops at the problem and does not consider the solution.

He had wished me well in finding my own fate to follow, and I never doubted his sincerity. But it had taken me years to accept that his absence in my life was a deliberate finality, an act he had chosen, a thing completed even as some part of my soul still dangled, waiting for his return. 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.

There was always something to be learned from any experience, no matter how horrendous. As long as a man kept sight of that, his spirit could prevail against anything. It was only when one gave in and believed the universe to be nothing more than a chaotic collection of unfortunate or cruel events that one's spirit could be crushed.

Trust had. But I had broken that, like a child who takes something apart to see how it works and ends up with a handful of pieces. Perhaps he could not be the Fool again, any more than I could go back to being Burrich's stable boy. Perhaps our relationship had changed too profoundly for us to relate as Fitz and the Fool. Perhaps Tom Badgerlock and Lord Golden were all that was left to us.

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?

You earn your future, Malta Vestrit." The bead-maker cocked her head at her. "What does tomorrow owe you?" "Tomorrow owes me?" Malta repeated in confusion. "Tomorrow owes you the sum of your yesterdays. No more than that." Amber looked out to sea again. "And no less. Sometimes folk wish tomorrow did not pay them off so completely.

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.

It was, after all, a time for heroes and all sorts of marvelous things to occur.

I don't need to be a hero, Fool. I'd settle for feeling that what I did every day had significance to someone besides myself." "p. 144 Fitz to the Fool

And what do you believe?" A slow smile spread over his face. "I believe in you. You are my new beginning.

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?

Dragon droppings?" Per asked in awe, as if that were the most fantastic part of their tale.

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.