Robin Hobb
...sometimes it only makes one more lonely to know that somewhere else, one's friends and family are well.Collection: Lonely
This, more than anything else, is what I have never understood about your people. You can roll dice, and understand that the whole game may hinge on one turn of a die. You deal out cards, and say that all a man's fortune for the night may turn upon one hand. But a man's whole life, you sniff at, and say, what, this naught of a human, this fisherman, this carpenter, this thief, this cook, why, what can they do in the great wide world? And so you putter and sputter your lives away, like candles burning in a draft.Collection: Night
Her stillness was such a contrast to all the jumbled communication inside me that I suddenly felt what a tiresome fellow I was, always filling the air with the rattle of words and anxieties.Collection: Communication
To be honest, I don't think of any of my characters as minor characters - they're all the main characters in a story that I don't necessarily get to tell.Collection: Character
You can be the dead fish. I'll be the old stickCollection: Sticks
If I had a dog that was sick as often as you are, I'd put it down," he observed kindly.Collection: Dog
All events, no matter how earthshaking or bizarre, are diluted within moments of their occurrence the the continuance of the necessary routines of day-to-day. -Fitz Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too. -Chade When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead. -Burrich We left. Walking uphill and into the wind. That suddenly seemed a metaphor for my whole life. -FitzCollection: Cutting
No. This is right. I feel it. I am the Catalyst, and I came to change all things. Prophets become warriors, dragons hunt as wolves. Fitz in Assassin's QuestCollection: Warrior
Ah, Catylast, can it be that you do not see all the changes you have made? Some by your resignation and acceptance of circumstance, some by your wild struggles. You say that you hate change, but you *are* change. The Fool in Fool's FateCollection: Hate
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.Collection: Pain
My blood will only buy you that fool's regard. I will pay a high price for you to be respected by a churl. Nothing bought with blood is worth having, young man.Collection: Men
Do you do this because you live such short lives? Tell yourselves wild tales of what might happen tomorrow, and feel all the feelings of events that will never happen? Perhaps to make up for the pasts you cannot recall, you invent futures that will not exist.Collection: Short Life
Men cannot grieve as dogs do. But they grieve for many years.Collection: Dog
I began attempting to write for children under the mistaken assumption that writing for children was easy.Collection: Children
In real life, things don't all end at the nice same place. To keep the story real, there has to be kind of a ragged edge at the end of a novel.Collection: Real
Men of passion and vision are often seen as mad.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Farewell
Well,the fun part of being a writer is that it's like making a wonderful film, with no limit on my budget. I can design the sets, the costume, the lightings, I write the script, and then I get to perform all the roles as I step into each character's skin, zip up, and adopt that point of view. So, to me, they are all compelling and fascinating.Collection: Fun
That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in such a way that there is no need for its intervention.Collection: Government
What good is a life lived as if it made no difference at all to the great life of the world? - FoolCollection: Differences
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.Collection: Hurt
It was hard to reconcile the drumbeats and lifted voices in the night with my memories of flames and the screams of dying men. How could humanity range so effortlessly from the sublime to the savage and back again?Collection: Memories
As I apologized to her a flicker of panic raced through me and then faded away. There wasn't enough life left in me to panic. I'd made a mistake and I was dying. Apparently not even a Speck afterlife was available to me. I'd simply stop being. Apparently I hadn't died correctly. Oops.Collection: Mistake
Fitz: Shall we get up tomorrow and go looking for a wild pig? Nighteyes: I didn’t lose any wild pigs, did you?Collection: Pigs
Locked into loneliness were we two and looking at one another every evening we each saw the one we blamed for it.Collection: Loneliness
You are confusing plumbing and love again.Collection: Confusing
No man is so dangerous as the man who cannot decide what he fears.Collection: Men
the greatest danger is always the one we are ignorant of.Collection: Ignorant
The fight isn't over until you win it, Fitz. That's all you have to remember. No matter what the other man says.Collection: Fighting
Silent," the carved wizardwood on his wrist breathed. "Silent as a blinded ship, floating hull-up in the sea. Silent as a scream underwater.Collection: Sea
King Shrewd is expecting me, rather he isn't expecting me, and that is precisely why I must go to him now.Collection: Kings
A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.Collection: Bed
Some people say 'I want to be a writer,' and some people say, 'I want to write.'Collection: Writing
I feared my own kind more than anything the natural world could ever threaten me with.Collection: Fear
Thinking is not always...comforting. It is always good, but not always comforting. Royal AssassinCollection: Thinking
To be part of a family, or any community, is to have duties and responsibility, to be bound by the rules of that group.Collection: Responsibility
I thought we had lost you. I thought we'd done something worse than let you die.' His old arms were tight and strong about me. I was kind to the old man. I did not tell him they had.Collection: Strong
Why does the forbidden always add that edge of sweetness?Collection: Romance