Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand
14 quotes
"...it's strange, isn't it, how you don't know how big a part of you someone is until they're threatened? And then you think you can't possibly go on if something happens to them, but the most frightening part is that, actually, you will go on, you'll have to go on, with them or without them. There's just no telling what you'll 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."
"I think that old magic draws much of its strength from that acknowledgment: that we are a part of that world."
"There is nothing dishonorable about abandoning pain. Sometimes peace is most quickly found when a man simply stops avoiding it."
"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."
"Leave old pains alone. When they cease coming to call, do not invite them back."
"As much as I had always longed to be freed of my duties and obligations, being released from such bonds was as much a severing as an emancipation."
"The past is no further away than the last breath you took."
"Stop longing.You poison today’s ease, reaching always for tomorrow."
"And what do you believe?”A slow smile spread over his face. “I believe in you. You are my new beginning."
"...I've returned and I look around me and think, I've missed my life. While I was off and alone, it went on here, without me, and I'm forever doomed to be a stranger in my own home."
"A while later, I lingered in the hinterlands of sleep. Sometimes I think there is more rest in that place between wakefulness and sleep than there is in true sleep. The mind walks in the twilight of both states, and finds the truths that are hidden alike by daylight and dreams. Things we are not ready to know abide in that place, awaiting that unguarded frame of mind."
"Regrets are useless, " the Fool replied. "All you can do is start from where you are."
"Despite my pain, I felt not the regret of an ending, but the foreboding of a beginning."