Charlotte C > Charlotte's Quotes

“Time is an unkind teacher, delivering lessons that we learn far too late for them to be useful. Years after I could have benefited from them, the insights come to me.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Assassin

“You are confusing plumbing and love again.”
― Robin Hobb

“One can only walk so far from one's true self before the bond either snaps, or pulls one back.”
― Robin Hobb, Royal Assassin

“I have heard it called a dance, I have heard it called a battle. Some men speak of it with a knowing laugh, some with a sneer. I have heard the study market women chuckling over it like hens clucking over bread crumbs; I have been approached by bawds who spoke their wares as boldly as peddlers hawking fresh fish. For myself, I think some things are beyond words. The color blue can only be experienced, as can the scent of jasmine or the sound of a flute. The curve of a warm bared shoulder, the uniquely feminine softness of a breast, the startled sound one makes when all barriers suddenly yield, the perfume of her throat, the taste of her skin are all but parts, and sweet as they may be, they do not embody the whole. A thousand such details still would not illustrate it.”
― Robin Hobb, Royal Assassin

“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

“Fitz: Shall we get up tomorrow and go looking for a wild pig?
Nighteyes: I didn’t lose any wild pigs, did you?”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand

“Come, hunt with me, the invitation whispers in my heart. 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, Royal Assassin

“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

“Why can't people love one another and still remain free?" Althea demanded suddenly.

Amber paused to rub her eyes, then tug thoughtfully at her earring. "One can love that way," she conceded regretfully. "But the price on that kind of love may be the highest of all." She strung her words together as carefully as she strung her beads. "To love another person like that, you have to admit that his life is as important as yours. Harder still, you have to admit to yourself that perhaps he has needs you cannot fill, and that you have tasks that will take you far away from him. It costs loneliness and longing and doubt and...”
― Robin Hobb, The Mad Ship

“Do you not see how strange and wonderful that is? That all history balances on an affair of the human heart?”
― Robin Hobb, Ship of Destiny

“Wolves have no kings.”
― Robin Hobb, Royal Assassin

“One must plan for the future and anticipate the future without fearing the future.”
― Robin Hobb, Ship of Magic

“When you fear to fail, you fear something that has not happened yet. You predict your own failure, and by inaction, lock yourself into it.”
― Robin Hobb, Ship of Destiny

“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.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Fate

“the greatest danger is always the one we are ignorant of.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Fate

“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.”
― Robin Hobb

“I never confuse the cost of something with its value”
― Robin Hobb, The Mad Ship

“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.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand

“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.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Fate

“If I had a dog that was sick as often as you are, I'd put it down," he observed kindly.”
― Robin Hobb, Royal Assassin

“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.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand

“Justice. There's a thing we shall ever thirst after, and ever be parched. No. We content ourselves with law.”
― Robin Hobb, Royal Assassin

“To recognize you are the source of your own loneliness is not a cure for it. But it is a step toward seeing that it is not inevitable, and that such a choice is not irrevocable.”
― Robin Hobb, Golden Fool

“You can be the dead fish. I'll be the old stick”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand

“...sometimes it only makes one more lonely to know that somewhere else, one's friends and family are well.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Quest

“What good is a life lived as if it made no difference at all to the great life of the world?”
― Robin Hobb

“Remember with your heart. Go back, go back and go back. The skies of this world were always meant to have dragons. When they are not here, humans miss them. Some never think of them, of course. But some children, from the time they are small, they look up at the blue summer sky and watch for something that never comes. Because they know. Something that was supposed to be there faded and vanished. Something that we must bring back, you and I.”
― Robin Hobb, Golden Fool

“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 Fate”
― Robin Hobb

“King Shrewd is expecting me, rather he isn't expecting me, and that is precisely why I must go to him now.”
― Robin Hobb, Royal Assassin

“Chade, I know the Fool is strange. But I like it when he comes to talk to me. He speaks in riddles, and he insults me, and makes fun of me, and gives himself leave to tell me things he thinks I should do, like wash my hair, or not wear yellow. But (...) I like him. He mocks me, but from him, it seems a kindness. He makes me feel, well, important. That he could choose me to talk to.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice