Top 141 Quotes & Sayings by Robin Hobb - Page 2

Writers really do that. We weep over our characters. We are saddened sometimes for days when we say goodbye to a world or a character. They do become our best friends. I've probably spent more time with them over the past 22, 24 years than I have spent with most of the real members of my family.

How different would our perception of reality be if... we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams?

How do you politely explain to someone that you had believed for years he was a moron as well as a Fool?

...To free humanity of time. For time is the great enslaver of us all. Time that ages us, time that limits us. Think how often you have wished to have more time for something, or wished you could go back a day and do something differently. When humanity is freed of time, old wrongs can be corrected before they are done.

Start writing sooner. Don't wait for permission. Don't hesitate.

But change proves that you are still alive. Change often measures our tolerance for folk different from ourselves. Can we accept their languages, their customs, their garments, and their foods into our own lives? If we can, then we form bonds, bonds that make wars less likely. If we cannot, if we believe that we must do things as we have always done them, then we must either fight to remain as we are, or die

I am the King's Fool. He is the King-In-Wating. Let him wait.

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

I healed. Not completely. A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding.

Besides, if there were no dragons of flesh and blood and fire, whence would come the idea for these stone carvings?

I do not know whom I wish to win; until I do, I will let no player be eliminated.

Not being able to think of a reply is not the same thing as accepting another's words.

learning is never wrong. Even learning how to kill isn't wrong. Or right. It's just a thing to learn, a thing I can teach you. That's all.

Sometimes it seems unfair that events so old can reach forward through the years, sinking claws into one's life and twisting all that follows it. Yet perhaps that is the ultimate justice: we are the sum of all we have done added to the sum of all that has been done to us. There is no escaping that, not for any of us.

A woman of many talents. And intelligent, too. He'd probably have to kill her soon.

When you spring to an idea, and decide it is truth, without evidence, you blind yourself to other possibilities.

Fitz fixes fyces fitz.Fatsafices.

Life is not a race to restore a past situation. Nor does one have to hurry to meet the future. Seeing how things change is what makes life interesting.

Nothing takes the heart out of a man more than the expectation of failure.

Men cannot grieve as dogs do. But they grieve for many years.

Sometimes it seemed to me a cruelty that so much was unresolved between us; at other times, a blessing that a hope of reunion lingered.

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

I believed that by fixing it down in words, I could force sense from all that had happened, that effect would follow cause, and the reason for each event come clear to me. But then I returned one day, to find all my careful scribing gone to fragments of vellum lying in a trampled yard with wet snow blowing over them. I sat my horse, looking down at them, and knew that, as it always would, the past had broken free of my effort to define and understand it. History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.

When both my editors say 'This is really bad, you need to change this,' I ignore that at my peril.

For, "Yes," he had sighed on his dying breath, and all knew that was the ultimate prayer one could offer to life.

Silent," the carved wizardwood on his wrist breathed. "Silent as a blinded ship, floating hull-up in the sea. Silent as a scream underwater.

One had a knife. But I had a staff and was trained to use it.

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.

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

A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.

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?

Every writer knows a lot more about their characters and story than actually makes it onto the page.

When you are writing, you have to love all your characters. If you're writing something from a minor character's point of view, you really need to stop and say the purpose of this character isn't to be somebody's sidekick or to come in and put the horse in the stable. The purpose of this character is you're getting a little window into that character's life and that character's day. You have to write them as if they're not a minor character, because they do have their own things going on.

King Shrewd is expecting me, rather he isn't expecting me, and that is precisely why I must go to him now.

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.

For the weakest has but to try his strength to find it, and then he shall be strong.

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.

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

Thinking is not always...comforting. It is always good, but not always comforting. Royal Assassin

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.

Useless to worry until we find outselves 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.

You are confusing plumbing and love again.

But a living is not a life.

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.

the greatest danger is always the one we are ignorant of.

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.

Don't listen to people who tell you that very few people get published and you won't be one of them. Don't listen to your friend who says you are better that Tolkien and don't have to try any more. Keep writing, keep faith in the idea that you have unique stories to tell, and tell them.

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.

To be part of a family, or any community, is to have duties and responsibility, to be bound by the rules of that group.

If a man does not die of a wound, then it heals in some fashion, and so it is with loss. From the sharp pain of immediate berevement, both the Prince and I passed into the gray days of numb bewilderment and waiting. So grief has always seemed to me, a time of waiting not for the hurt to pass, but to become accustomed to it.

Be a man. Discover where you are now, and go on from there, making the best of things. accept your life, and you might survive it. If you hold back from it, insisting this is not your life, not where you are meant to be, life will pass you by. You may not die from such foolishness, but you might as well be dead for all the good your life will do you or anyone else.

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.

The fight isn't over until you win it, Fitz. That's all you have to remember. No matter what the other man says.

Fitz: Shall we get up tomorrow and go looking for a wild pig? Nighteyes: I didn’t lose any wild pigs, did you?

I began attempting to write for children under the mistaken assumption that writing for children was easy.

A terrible premonition washed over me. This was how the whole world would end.... They would devour the forest and excrete piles of buildings made of stone wrenched from the earth or from dead trees. They would hammer paths of bare stone between their dwellings, and dirty the rivers and subdue the land until it could recall only the will of man. They could not stop themselves from doing what they did. They did not see what they did, and even if they saw, they did not know how to stop. They no longer knew what was enough.

Death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice.

Not all men are destined for greatness," I reminded him. "Are you sure, Fitz? Are you sure? What good is a life lived as if it made no difference at all to the great life of the world? A sadder thing I cannot imagine. Why should not a mother say to herself, if I raise this child aright, if I love and care for her, she shall live a life that brings joy to those about her, and thus I have changed the world? Why should not the farmer that plants a seed say to his neighbor, this seed I plant today will feed someone, and that is how I changed the world today?

Men of passion and vision are often seen as mad.

No man is so dangerous as the man who cannot decide what he fears.