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Some things are better said to the dark.
Silence can ask all the questions, where the tongue is prone only to ask the wrong one.
Some speak of the savagery of beasts. I will ever prefer that to the thoughtless contempt some men have towards animals.
‘When you cut pieces from the truth to avoid sounding like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead.’
When you speak in riddles, it exasperates me. Yet when you try to speak clearly of yourself, it frightens me.’
‘Death is always less painful and easier than life! You speak true. And yet we do not, day to day, choose death. Because ultimately, death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Death is what you get when there are no choices left to make.
you imagine the worst, and when you do, your mind stops at the problem and does not consider the solution.’
I knew then that I stood at the lip of the abyss. I flung myself off into it.
do not treat me as if I am already dead, or dying. If you see me that way, then I would rather truly be dead. You steal the now of my life away, when you constantly fear that tomorrow will bring my death.
‘If I bonded with you, you would be the poorer, for you would lose that which you love best about me, for it is that I do not need you, yet I tolerate your company.’
much discomfort was based on human expectations.
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 bereavement, both the Prince and I passed into the grey 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.
we attempt such histories not to preserve knowledge, but to fix the past in a settled way.
History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.
I walked wounded through my life in the days that followed, unaware of just how mutilated I was. I was like the man who complains of the itching of his severed leg. The itching distracts from the immense knowledge that one will ever after hobble through life. So the immediate grief at his death concealed the full damage done to me. I was confused, thinking that my pain and my loss were one and the same thing, whereas one was but a symptom of the other.
To recognize you are the source of your own loneliness is not a cure for it. But it is a step towards seeing that it is not inevitable, and that such a choice is not irrevocable.
‘The weapon we throw away today is the one at our throats tomorrow,’
‘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.’
Silence asks the questions that are too awkward to phrase. It even asks the questions one does not know to ask.
as sweet as spoiling fish.
Fish? No fish. Sorry. ‘Sorry’ is not fish. What good is ‘sorry’?
‘We could have gone all our lives and never had this conversation. Now you have doomed us both to recall it forever.’
And it was not so much that he had his way with her, as that she had hers with him.
Hobb
