Quotes by Robin Hobb

The world had to change and for some reason the prosperity of men always results in them taking ever more from wild creatures and places.

...its strange, isnt it, how you dont know how big a part of you someone is until theyre threatened? And then you think you cant possibly go on if something happens to them, but the most frightening part is that, actually, you will go on, youll have to go on, with them or without them. Theres just no telling what youll become

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.

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. 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.

She had come to letters late in her life, and though she had mastered them, they had never become her good friends.

History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.

It is worse than useless to do things halfway Bee, for then you think the work is done, but someone must come behind you later to do it all over again. Even if you must work much harder and get less done, it is better to do the whole task the first time.

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

Humans could never accept the world as it was and live in it. They were always breaking it and living amongst the shattered pieces.

He thought perhaps it was a womans way, to come out of such a storm of emotion and pain as if she were a ship emerging onto calm seas. She had seemed, not at peace, but emptied of sorrow. As if she had run out of that particular emotion and no other one arose to take its place.

He longed for cleanliness and tidiness: it was hard to find peace in the middle of disorder.

Acceptance of what is. That is the shortest path to peace with yourself.

There is nothing dishonorable about abandoning pain. Sometimes peace is most quickly found when a man simply stops avoiding it.

Anticipating pain was like enduring it twice. Why not anticipate pleasure instead?

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.

And the world re-ordered itself around me. I spoke each word carefully. You are so stupid.

Had she learned to feel again, only to have to feel this? Could any amount of love ever be worth the pain of losing it?

In the dead of night I stirred. Wakefulness flowed back into me. I was a cup full of sorrow, but that sorrow was stilled, like a pain that abates as long as one does not move.

When has been disappointed for so long, hope becomes the enemy. One cannot be dashed to the earth unless one is lifted first, and I learned to avoid hope.

Leave old pains alone. When they cease coming to call, do not invite them back.