Quotes from Robin Hobb

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.

How could the whole world not be as broken as I was?

When Hap had been ten, it had been so much easier to know that I was doing the right things for him. Feed him well, teach him to fish, see that he had clean clothes and slept well at night. That was most of what a boy needed. A young man was a different animal entirely.

And the world re-ordered itself around me. I spoke each word carefully. 'You are so stupid.

So many things were easier to live with if you didn't give them much thought. p. 28

A boy is a man when he proves himself to be one, but a girl is a woman when she desires to be one.

Não reconheci a minha voz quando perguntei ao mundo: 'Como pode a coisa mais difícil que já fiz na vida ser também a mais cobarde?

Trust is not trust until it is complete.

Althea had never known that misery could achieve perfection. Only now, as she sat staring at her emptied glass, did she grasp how completely wrong her world had become. Things had been bad before, things had been flawed, but it was only today that she had made one stupid decision after another until everything was as completely wrong as it could possibly be.

é estranho, não é, como não se sabe até que ponto alguém faz parte de nós até esse alguém ser ameaçado? E depois achas que não há possibilidade de sobreviveres se alguma coisa lhes acontece, mas a pare mais assustadora é que, na verdade, sobrevives, tens de sobreviver, com eles ou sem eles. Simplesmente não há maneira de saberes em que te tornarás.

I lied to hurt you. For letting him be dead while you lived. For being loved by him more than he loved me! He loved you more than he ever loved any of the rest of us!

Many great ideas are not unique. They only become unique when the men who have the wherewithal actually to implement them come together.

So this was our adventure. And the prince and the princess get married and live happily ever after, with many children to warm the in their old age.' He had probably heard that phrase thousands of times in his life. It was a common way for a minstrel to end a hero tale. 'Perhaps,' I said cautiously. 'Perhaps.' 'What happens to the rest of us?

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

Patience had once counseled me that the best way to stop pitying myself was to do something for someone else.

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.

Explanations had seldom worked between us. Trust had.

If it was raining soup, you'd be out there with a fork.

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.

It was a simple account of an incident from his childhood. At the time I recall that I wondered why he had written it down. He obviously remembered it clearly; why bother to record it on paper? Only later was I to learn from my own obsessive journaling of my dreams that sometimes the best way to understand something is to write it down." p. 355

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

It was better to leave the space empty of words than to choose the wrong ones.

Never have I heard anything so unnerving as a hardened warrior praying to a god known for his merciless heart.

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.