The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1)

by Patrick Rothfuss

if I was going to do something, I should take my time and do it right.

So that's why it's STILL unfinished as a trilogy lmao

“So Taborlin fell, but he did not despair. For he knew the name of the wind, and so the wind obeyed him. He spoke to the wind and it cradled and caressed him. It bore him to the ground as gently as a puff of thistledown and set him on his feet softly as a mother’s kiss.

“A tinker’s debt is always paid: Once for any simple trade. Twice for freely-given aid. Thrice for any insult made.”

“You’d be surprised at the sorts of things hidden away in children’s songs.

don’t believe you can ever learn all of anything, let alone a language.”

“Call a jack a jack. Call a spade a spade. But always call a whore a lady. Their lives are hard enough, and it never hurts to be polite.”

That was the hardest part of growing up Edema Ruh. We are strangers everywhere. Many folk view us as vagabonds and beggars, while others deem us little more than thieves, heretics, and whores. It’s hard to be wrongfully accused,

Ah, travellers indeed

It gets tiresome being spoken to as if you are a child, even if you happen to be one.

It felt the same way your body feels after a day of splitting wood, or swimming, or sex. You feel exhausted, languorous, and almost Godlike.

When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.

Lord but I dislike poetry. How can anyone remember words that aren’t put to music?”

A poet is a musician who can’t sing. Words have to find a man’s mind before they can touch his heart, and some men’s minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly no matter how small or stubborn the mind of the man who listens.”

A clever, thoughtless person is one of the most terrifying things there is.

My parents danced together, her head on his chest. Both had their eyes closed. They seemed so perfectly content. If you can find someone like that, someone who you can hold and close your eyes to the world with, then you’re lucky.

The saying “time heals all wounds” is false. Time heals most wounds. The rest are hidden behind this door.

There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind. Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told.

The only notice I took of my surroundings was when it rained, because then I could not bring out my lute to play, and that pained me. Of course I played. It was my only solace. By the end of the first month, my fingers had calluses hard as stones and I could play for hours upon hours.

Fear tends to come from ignorance. Once I knew what the problem was, it was just a problem, nothing to fear.

He smiled timidly, as if the joke was a pair of old boots that had worn out long ago, but were too comfortable to give up.

The Tahl have a saying about children of our age. The boy grows upward, but the girl grows up.

But beyond all that, two facts remain to recommend a cloak. First, very little is as striking as a well-worn cloak, billowing lightly about you in the breeze. And second, the best cloaks have innumerable little pockets that I have an irrational and overpowering attraction toward.

Asking to hold a musician’s instrument is roughly similar to asking to kiss a man’s wife. Nonmusicians don’t understand. An instrument is like a companion and a lover.

We know how it ends practically before it starts. That’s why stories appeal to us. They give us the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack.”

even the lowest art of all: poetry.

I couldn’t stand being near music and not be a part of it. It was like watching the woman you love bedding down with another man.

That is how I felt, watching the musicians play. I couldn’t stand it. The everyday lack of my music was like a toothache I had grown used to. I could live with it. But having what I wanted dangled in front of me was more than I could bear.

When the Chandrian killed my troupe, they destroyed every piece of family and home I had ever known. But in some ways it had been worse when my father’s lute was broken in Tarbean. It had been like losing a limb, an eye, a vital organ. Without my music, I had wandered Tarbean for years, half-alive, like a crippled veteran or one of the walking dead.

Music is a proud, temperamental mistress. Give her the time and attention she deserves, and she is yours. Slight her and there will come a day when you call and she will not answer.

Sim leaned over and lay his hand on my shoulder, the very picture of the concerned friend. “Kvothe, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this very problem. If you honestly couldn’t tell that she was interested in you, you might want to admit the possibility that you are impossibly thick when it comes to women. You may want to consider the priesthood.”

Metal rusts, I thought, music lasts forever.

Anyone with three fingers could play it, and if you had one ear and a bucket you could carry the tune.

How young I was. How foolish. How wise.

“Where do you think stories come from, E’lir Kvothe? Every tale has deep roots somewhere in the world.”

“Names are the shape of the world, and a man who can speak them is on the road to power.

“It is a word. Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. There are seven words that will make a person love you. There are ten words that will break a strong man’s will. But a word is nothing but a painting of a fire. A name is the fire itself.”

“You see, there’s a fundamental connection between seeming and being. Every Fae child knows this, but you mortals never seem to see. We understand how dangerous a mask can be. We all become what we pretend to be.”

“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”