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

by Patrick Rothfuss

The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.

“In evening when the sun is setting fast, I’ll watch for you from high above The time for your return is long since past But mine is ever-faithful love.”

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.

First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain.

Second is the door of forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly. In addition, many memories are simply painful, and there is no healing to be done.

Third is the door of madness. There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity.

Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told.

You don’t really understand the ocean until you are in the midst of it, nothing but ocean on all sides, stretching away endlessly. Only then do you realize how small you are, how powerless.

“But we are all creatures of habit. It is far too easy to stay in the familiar ruts we dig for ourselves.

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

But old habits die slow deaths.

pride is a strange thing, and because generosity deserves generosity in return.

The boy grows upward, but the girl grows up.

Trapis pulled away from me and turned to look. “What what,” he said as he hurried over to tend to her, his bare feet slapping on the floor. “What what. Hush hush.”

as above, so below.

Want isn’t strong enough a word. I was hungry for it, starved.

For half a heartbeat I almost threw my whole plan aside just to stay with her a little longer. But the moment passed and I shook my head.

anger can keep you warm at night, and wounded pride can spur a man to wondrous things.

Perhaps it is human nature to seek out hidden things.

To really fear something you have to dwell on it.

“Not women, Bast. A woman. The woman.”

“We are more than the parts that form us, Bast,”

Since we parted ways, I had kept foolish, fond thoughts of Denna hidden in a secret corner of my heart.

“I am not many people,” she said.

The night is like warm velvet around them. The stars, burning diamonds in the cloudless sky, turn the road beneath their feet a silver grey.

Only then did I realize I was poised in a sort of half-crouch, one hand out like a wrestler. In the other hand I held my pitiful folding knife, so small it needed several runs at halving a good-sized apple. Worst of all I was only wearing one boot. I looked ridiculous:

“We want the sweet things, but we need the unpleasant ones.”

“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.”