Quotes from Robin Hobb

Fishing and ear scratching. The two reasons men were given hands.

I loved that man as I have loved no one else. I do not say I loved him more than I love your mother. But that the way I loved him was different. But if you have heard there was anything improper in our bond, there was not. That was not what we were to one another. What we had went beyond that.

One can only walk so far from one's true self before the bond either snaps, or pulls back. I am fortunate. I have been pulled back.

I feared my own kind more than anything the natural world could ever threaten me with.

I was almost annoyed at her for spoiling my perfectly good sulk.

Useless to worry until we find ourselves blocked. ... If it happens, then we must simply find a way around it. It may slow us down. But we will never get there at all if we stand still and worry.

We were one thing. A whole thing. You and I and Nighteyes. I felt a strange sort of peace. As if all the parts of me were finally in one place. All the missing bits that would make me a complete... thing.' I shook my head. 'Words don't read that far.

If a few students come reluctantly to their studies, then let them go. If all students come reluctantly to their studies, then let your scribe be dismissed and find another. For once students have been taught that learning is tedious, difficult, and useless, they will never learn another lesson.

So, with all the wide world to choose from, you didn't choose at all. You simply stopped wandering one day

I think that old magic draws much of its strength from that acknowledgment: that we are a part of that world.

Fitz: How bad is it? Nighteyes: Mind your own business. Fitz: You ARE my business. Nighteyes: Sharing pain doesn't loosen it. Fitz: I'm not sure about THAT.

What good is a life lived as if it made no difference at all to the great life of the world?

The loneliness that can never be filled by anyone except the one whose loss created the absence;

Vengeance took no account of innocence or right. It was the chain that bound horrific events together, that decreed that one awful act must beget another worse one that would lead to yet a third. It came to me, slowly, that this chain would never end.

If I had a dog that was sick as often as you are, I'd put it down," he observed kindly.

I think myself cured of all spite, but when I touch pen to paper, the hurt of a boy bleeds out with sea-spawned ink, until I suspect each carefully formed black letter scabs over some ancient scarlet wound.

Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever.

I wondered if there was any way to live amongst other people and refuse to be harnessed by their expectations and dependencies.

I found myself speaking softly as if I were telling an old tale to a young child. And giving it a happy ending, when all know that tales never end, and the happy ending is but a moment to catch one's breath before the next disaster.

Many will rant and rave against the garment fate has woven for them, but they pick it up and don it all the same, and most wear it to the end of their days. You... you would rather go naked into the storm.

I told you it was foolish. But feelings do not have to be wise. Feelings just are.

Honour and courtesy and justice...they are not real, Fitz. We all pretend to them, and hold them to us like shields. But they guard only against folk who carry the same shields. Against those who have discarded them, they are no shields at all, but only additional weapons to use against their victims.

Maybe you have to keep your pain and loss to know that you can survive whatever life deals you. Perhaps without putting your pain in its place in your life, you became something of a coward.

Name it as you will, claim it as you will, the world does not belong to men. Men belong to the world. You will not own the earth that eventually your body will become, nor will it recall the name it once answered to.