Quotes from Robin Hobb

I wonder if I can write this history, or if on every page there will be some sneaking show of a bitterness I thought long dead. I think myself cured of all spite, but when I touch pen to paper, the hurt of a boy bleeds out with the sea-spawned ink, until I suspect each carefully formed black letter scabs over some ancient scarlet wound.

We are as we are. How can you claim to know what life I was meant to lead, let alone threaten to force me into it? All your quibbling is nonsense. As well forbid your nose to snuff, or your ears to hear. We are as we do.

History is what we do in our lives. We create it as we go along.' He smiled enigmatically. 'The future is another kind of history.

much discomfort was based on human expectations. As a man, I expected to be warm and dry when I chose to be. Animals did not harbor any such beliefs. So it was raining. That part of me that was wolf could accept that. Rain meant being cold and wet. Once I acknowledged that and stopped comparing it to what I wished it to be, the conditions were far more tolerable.

The truth, I discovered, is a tree that grows as a man gains access to experience. A child sees the acorn of his daily life, but a man looks back on the oak.

If one bad thing befell me, I immediately linked it to every bad thing that had happened in the last week or might happen in the coming week. And when I became sad, I was prone to wallow in grief, piling up my woes and sprawling on them like a dragon on a hoard.

If all of her was not enough for him, then let him have none of her and seek what he needed elsewhere.

FitzChivalry Farseer, too long have you sojourned among the Elderlings, your memory spurned by the very people you saved. Too long have you been in a place where the months pass as if days. Too long have you walked among us in false guise, deprived of your name and your honor. Rise. Turn and face the folk of the Six Duchies, your folk, and be welcomed home at last.

I accepted their ridicule by sulking manfully.

finally realizing that life was to be lived, rather than hoarded against an unseen tomorrow.

Locked into loneliness were we two and looking at one another every evening we each saw the one we blamed for it.

He gave a final shake of his coat. 'I go to the hunt!

Once one knows what heartless people can do, it cannot be entirely forgotten. It always remains among the possible things that can befall you.

Surprise!-FitzChivalry

It was possible to be homesick for a time, and to be lonely for the only other person who could recall it.

How strange to be loved simply for who I was.

Now, I've had boys of my own, and I know boys aren't that way. They don't learn, or grow, or have manners when you're looking at them. But turn away, and turn back, and there they are, smarter, taller, and charming everyone but their own mothers.

I think I made a better boy than I do a man, I admitted ruefully to the wolf. Why not wait until you've been at it a bit longer and then decide? he suggested.

Having something explained to you does not always solve it.

A secret is only yours so long as you don't share it. Tell it to one person, and it's a secret no more.

Somewhere inside me, a madman raged in his cell, but I chose not to know of that.

And so the Wolf of the West rose from the stone! And so he will rise again if ever the folk of the Six Duchies call to him in need.

It doesn't work that way. Silencing memories does not make them stop existing. Events cannot be undone by forgetting them.

Oh, the things we discover and the things we learn, much too late. Worse are the secrets that are not secrets, the sorrows we live with but do not admit to one another.