Quotes from Robin Hobb

But there is another type, one who goes about the world cadaverously, cheeks sunken, bones jutting, and one senses that he so disapproves of the whole of the world that he begrudges every bit of it that he takes inside himself. At that moment I would have wagered that Galen had never truly enjoyed one bite of food or one swallow of drink in his life.

Once, she would have found him mysterious and alluring. She had grown wiser. Dangerous men were neither romantic nor exotic; they were men who could hurt you.

I sat listening to the birdcalls and smelling the new day's warmth touching the earth. Such things have always been a deep comfort to me. This morning they affirmed the goodness of the earth always goes on and made me wish that I could stay to watch the summer grow strong and the fruit swell on the trees. p. 65

A man has to set limits on his magic and on himself. Setting limits is part of being a man.

It is hard to express the completeness of two beings moving as one, for a single purpose.

She felt silence growing in her. Sometimes it reminded her of a fast-growing ivy; silence covered her and cloaked her, and she suspected that one day she would smother in the silences Hest could create. It was an effort to break through that strangling quiet, but she did it.

She could change. She wasn't chained to her past. She could become someone who wasn't merely a product of what others had done to her. It wasn't too late.

Oh, I think that children pray so, to find a lost doll or that Father will bring home a good haul of fish, or that no one will discover a forgotten chore. Children think they know what is best for themselves, and do not fear to ask the divine for it. But I have been a man for many years, and I should be shamed if I did not know better by now.

You are not a prince, you are an assassin. You are not the player, you are the game-piece. And when you make your own moves, you set every other strategy awry and endanger every piece on the board!

FitzChivalry Farseer." I halted, frozen by the words. I turned slowly.

But it had taken me years to accept 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 dangling, 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.

I would never... do you understand me? I could never desire you as a bed partner. Never." "And that, too, is a thing that we both have known for years. A thing that never needed speaking, those words that I must now carry with me for the rest of my life. We could have gone all our lives and never had this conversation. Now you have doomed us both to recall it forever.

If this is 'good' coffee, I dread what bad coffee might be," I told her. I did as I'd seen Alise do, dumping my unwanted cupful back into the big black pot on the stove. I waited for the tea to brew.

There he remained, not leaning on the railing but standing straight beside her. He looked far ahead to a distant horizon. To a future he had been promised that now seemed far further than days or distance could make it.

Why must love cost anything? Why does need have to be mixed up with love? Why can't people be like butterflies, coming together in bright sunshine and parting while the day is still bright?' 'Because they are people, not butterflies. To pretend that people can come together, love, and then part with no pain or consequences is more false a role than pretending to be a proper Trader's daughter.

forgiven,' she said quietly to herself. She sounded ill with it. With an oddly gentle finality, she added, 'You

Are you listening, Buckman? For that is your role in this conversation. You listen.' I

Yet in any relationship there is always the capacity for abuse. Just as a husband may beat his wife, or a wife pare her husband's soul with belittlement

rather be forgotten for the things people think I've done. And I'd give it all if I could forget the things I failed to do.

I copied her silence. After a long time she observed, "Our own ambitions and tasks that we set for ourselves, the framework we attempt to impose upon the world, is no more than a shadow of a tree cast across the snow. It will change as the sun moves, be swallowed in the night, sway with the wind, and when the smooth snow vanishes, it will lie distorted upon the uneven earth. But the tree continues to be. Do you understand that?

A ruler must be of all his people, for one can only rule what one knows.

Had he his way, paper would be as common as bread, and every child would learn his letters before he was thirteen. But even were it so, I do not think this would bring to pass all he hopes. He mourns of all the knowledge that goes into a grave each time a man dies, even the commonest of men.

The exercise for centering oneself is a simple one. Stop thinking of what you intend to do. Stop thinking of what you have just done. Then, stop thinking that you have stopped thinking of those things. Then you will find the Now, the time that stretches eternal, and is really the only time there is. Then, in that place, you will finally have time to be yourself.

Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too