Quotes from Robin Hobb

It's all connected. When you save any part of the world, you've saved the whole world. In fact, that's the only way it can be done.

I lived my grief; I slept mourning and ate sorrow and drank tears. I ignored all else.

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...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.

If a man does not die of a wound, then it heals in some fashion, and so it is with loss. From the sharp pain of immediate berevement, both the Prince and I passed into the gray days of numb bewilderment and waiting. So grief has always seemed to me, a time of waiting not for the hurt to pass, but to become accustomed to it.

Leave off sniffing the carcass of your old life-do you enjoy unending pain? There is no shame in walking away from bones. Nor is there any special wisdom in injuring oneself over and over. What is your loyalty to that pain? To abandon it will not lessen you.

To recognize you are the source of your own loneliness is not a cure for it. But it is a step toward seeing that it is not inevitable, and that such a choice is not irrevocable.

This is our last hunt, old wolf. And as we have always done, we go to it together.

Sorrow and loss never die. We can put them away in a chest and lock it tight, but whenever it is opened, even a crack, the aroma of lost sweetness will rise to fill our lungs to heaviness.

Ah, Beloved. Of all the things I must bid farewell to, you are the most difficult to lose. Forgive me that I have avoided you. Better, perhaps, that we make a space between us and become accustomed to it before fate forces that upon us.

You know what I feel for you. You have known it for years. Let us not, you and I, alone here, pretend that you don't. You know I love you. I always have. I always will

One must plan for the future and anticipate the future without fearing the future.

There are endings. There are beginnings. Sometimes they coincide, with the ending of one thing marking the beginning of another. But sometimes there is simply a long space after an ending, a time when it seems everything else has ended and nothing else can ever begin.

What a man can take with a sword, a woman can give by her flesh alone. Life.

You are confusing plumbing and love again.

How do you politely explain to someone that you had believed for years he was a moron as well as a Fool? Fitz in Assassin's Apprentice

It doesn't have to be that bad,' Chade said quietly. 'Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too.

The art of diplomacy is the luck of knowing more of your rival's secrets than he knows of yours.

Undeserved forgiveness. Friendship defined.

One does not need the size of a dragon to have the soul of a dragon.

Besides, if there were no dragons of flesh and blood and fire, whence would come the idea for these stone carvings?

Utter loneliness was planted in me then, and sent its deep roots down into me.

Do you not see how strange and wonderful that is? That all history balances on an affair of the human heart?

Fitz: Shall we get up tomorrow and go looking for a wild pig? Nighteyes: I didn't lose any wild pigs, did you?

Justice. There's a thing we shall ever thirst after, and ever be parched. No. We content ourselves with law.