Kevin > Kevin's Quotes

“Don’t do what you can’t undo, until you’ve considered what you can’t do once you’ve done it.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“Very little worth knowing is taught by fear.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“When you spring to an idea, and decide it is truth, without evidence, you blind yourself to other possibilities.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“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.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“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.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“Too late to apologize, I've already forgiven you.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“When considering a man's motives, remember you must not measure his wheat with your bushel. He may not be using the same standard at all.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“How do you politely explain to someone that you had believed for years he was a moron as well as a Fool?
Fitz in Assassin's Apprentice”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“It doesn't have to be that bad,' Chade said quietly. 'Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“Men cannot grieve as dogs do. But they grieve for many years.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“My silences he mistook for a lack of wit rather than a lack of any need to speak.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“I do not know whom I wish to win; until I do, I will let no player be eliminated.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“I'd rather I was a stray pup,' I made bold to say. And then all my fears broke my voice as I added, "You wouldn't let them do this to a stray pup, changing everything all at once. When they gave the bloodhound puppy to Lord Grimsby, you sent your old shirt with it, so it would have something that smelled of home until it settle in.'
'Well,' he said, "I didn't ... come here, fitz. Come here, boy.'
And puppy-like, I went to him, the only master I had, and he thumped me lightly on the back and rumbled up my hair, very much as if I had been a hound.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“It was inside me. The more I sought it, the stronger it grew. It loved me. Loved me even if I couldn't, wouldn't, didn't love myself. Love me even if I hated. It set its tiny teeth in my soul and braced and held so that I couldn't crawl any further. And when I tried, a howl of despair burst from it, searing me, forbidding me to break so sacred trust.
It was Smithy.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“Because your heart will be hammered against him, and your strength will be tempered in his fire.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“I think myself cured of all spite, but when I touch pen to paper, the hurt of a boy bleeds out with sea-spawned ink, until I suspect each carefully formed black letter scabs over some ancient scarlet wound.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“That night I grasped another piece of the puzzle that Burrich had always been to me. For there is a very strange peace in giving over your judgment to someone else, to saying to them, “You lead and I will follow, and I will trust entirely that you will not lead me to death or harm.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“Suddenly, everything was easy and clear. I simply did whatever Chade told me to do, and trusted to him to have it turn out right. My spirit rode high on the crest of that wave of faith, and sometime during the night it occurred to me: this was what Burrich had had from Chivalry, and what he missed so badly.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“...I bit my tongue and sat through his detailed and strained explanation. Not for the first time, I realized he considered me slightly slow. My silences he mistook for a lack of wit rather than a lack of any need to speak.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“But in my heart, when I said “my king,” I meant Verity.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“ I don't know"

"When a man says that, it usually means, "No, I won't but from time to time, I'll toy with the idea, so I can pretend i eventually intend to do it.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“Men cannot grieve as dogs do.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“One can only walk so far from one's true self before the bond either snaps, or pulls back. I am fortunate. I have been pulled back.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“If all I had ever done was to be born and discovered, I would have left a mark across all the land for all time. I grew up fatherless and motherless in a court where all recognized me as a catalyst. And a catalyst I become.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“Had they been dogs they would have sniffed me over and then drawn back. But humans have no such inbred courtesies.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“He reaches forward slowly, to lift the pen from my lax grip. Wearily I regard the faltering trail of ink it has tracked down my page. I have seen that shape before, I think, but it was not ink then. A trickle of drying blood on the deck of a Red-Ship, and mine the hand that spilled it? Or was it a tendril of smoke rising black against a blue sky as I rode too late to warn a village of a Red-Ship raid? Or poison swirling and unfurling yellowly in a simple glass of water, poison I had handed someone, smiling all the while? The artless curl of a strand of woman's hair left upon my pillow? Or the trail of a man's heels left in the sand as we dragged the bodies from the smoldering tower at Sealbay? The track of a tear down a mother's cheek as she clutched her Forged infant to her despite his angry cries? Like Red-Ships, the memories come without warning, without mercy.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“sometimes luck belongs to children and madmen.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“Too late to apologize. I have already forgiven you.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“Leave the pain behind and let your life be your own again. There is a place where all time is now, and the choices are simple and always your own.

Wolves have no kings”
― Robin Hobb