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

by Patrick Rothfuss

he would most likely remain “boy” until his beard filled out or he bloodied someone’s nose over the matter.

“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.”

It’s hard to be wrongfully accused, but it’s worse when the people looking down on you are clods who have never read a book or traveled more than twenty miles from the place they were born.

If you are going to impose your will on the world, you must have control over what you believe.”

“The difference is between saying something to a person, and saying something about a person. The first might be rude, but the second is always gossip.”

If you can find someone like that, someone who you can hold and close your eyes to the world with, then you’re lucky. Even if it only lasts for a minute or a day.

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

old habits die slow deaths.

generosity deserves generosity in return.

Everyone deserves a moment or two alone when they desire it. And if by chance there were tears, let us forgive him. He was just a child, after all, and had yet to learn what sorrow really was.

hoping is a foolish game.

“There are two sure ways to lose a friend, one is to borrow, the other to lend.”

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. No. Not really. It was like. . . . It was like the sweet-eaters I’d seen in Tarbean. Denner resin was highly illegal, of course, but that didn’t matter in most parts of the city. The resin was sold wrapped in waxy paper, like a sucking candy or a toffee. Chewing it filled you with euphoria. Bliss. Contentment. But after a few hours you were shaking, filled with a desperate hunger for more, and that hunger grew worse the longer you used it. Once in Tarbean I saw a young girl of no more than sixteen with the telltale hollow eyes and unnaturally white teeth of the hopelessly addicted. She was begging a sailor for a sweet, which he held tauntingly out of reach. He told her it was hers if she stripped naked and danced for him, right there in the street. She did, not caring who might be watching, not caring that it was nearly Midwinter and she stood in four inches of snow. She pulled off her clothes and danced desperately, her thin limbs pale and shaking, her movements pathetic and jerky. Then, when the sailor laughed and shook his head, she fell to her knees in the snow, begging and weeping, clutching frantically at his legs, promising him anything, anything. . . . 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...

Damn···· that was some piccture in my head wtf

Do not hope. All you will earn is disappointment.

I honestly cannot think of how I could describe it. Lying would be easier. I could steal from a hundred stories and tell you a lie so familiar you would swallow it whole. I could say my knees went to rubber. That my breath came hard in my chest. But that would not be the truth. My heart did not pound or stop or stutter. That is the sort of thing they say happens in stories. Foolishness. Hyperbole. Tripe. But still . . . Go out in the early days of winter, after the first cold snap of the season. Find a pool of water with a sheet of ice across the top, still fresh and new and clear as glass. Near the shore the ice will hold you. Slide out farther. Farther. Eventually you’ll find the place where the surface just barely bears your weight. There you will feel what I felt. The ice splinters under your feet. Look down and you can see the white cracks darting through the ice like mad, elaborate spiderwebs. It is perfectly silent, but you can feel the sudden sharp vibrations through the bottoms of your feet. That is what happened when Denna smiled at me. I don’t mean to imply I felt as if I stood on brittle ice about to give way beneath me. No. I felt like the ice itself, suddenly shattered, with cracks spiraling out from where she had touched my chest. The only reason I held together was because my thousand pieces were all leaning together. If I moved, I feared I would fall apart. Perhaps it is enough to say that I was caught by a smile. And though that sounds as if it came from ...

don’t fabricate some story out of a misguided desire to pacify or impress me.”

They turned to go. I watched them walk through the cobbled streets of Imre. Together.

what a hoe