Quotes from Robin Hobb

Death fed life.

Thoughts were too fast for words and too complex. There was too much to say, more than anyone could ever say in a lifetime about even the simplest things.

He felt her dim groping towards him, a plea for companionship and comfort. He didn't want to give it. But he had never been a hard-hearted man. When she invaded his mind, pleading, he had to reach back. 'You are stronger than you know,' he told her. 'Keep moving. Follow the other ones, my copper beauty. Soon there will be better days for you, but for now you must be strong.

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.

Changes were the essence of life; one should not dread change.

Some people say there is relief in the sharing of cares and pains. To me there was no catharsis, only an unearthing of rotting corpses of memories, a baring of still suppurating wounds.

There are times when not thinking requires all of one's concentration.

Is it the nature of the world that all things seek a rhythm, and in that rhythm a sort o peace?

Children, I have found, are much more swift to accept the unusual. They admit their curiosity, you see, rather than disdaining the object that arouses it.

Worrying doesn't solve anything. I know that. In one way I know it but in another it seems wrong. It seems that if I don't think about all the things that hurt, all the things I've done wrong, then I don't really care.

Oh, the power that lurks in the naming of names.

Men deny animals have feelings and thoughts for one basic reason: so they won't feel guilty about what they do to them.

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.

As you will, King Fitz.

you cannot fend off the enemy if you do not have confidence in those who stand behind you.

It was right, what they said: Enlightenment was merely the truth at the correct time.

There can be much more to a decision than you can know at this stage of your life.

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.

You can't die from seasickness, but you wish you could.

One can swiftly understand that for most moments of our lives, we have forgotten almost all of the world around us, except for what currently claims our interest.

It was all in your mind," Chade told me sometime later, and it stung that he dismissed so lightly all that I had endured. 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.

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.

Stop defining yourself by what you can't do. Why don't you consider what you didn't lose?

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.