The Farseer Trilogy (The Farseer Trilogy, #1-3)

by Robin Hobb

But. Here we are, and here is always the place we must start from. Eh?”

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

The exercise for centering oneself is a simple one. Stop thinking of what you intend to do. Stop thinking of what you have just done. Then, stop thinking that you have stopped thinking of those things. Then you will find the Now, the time that stretches eternal, and is really the only time there is. Then, in that place, you will finally have time to be yourself.

A year passes for a wolf as a decade does for a man. Time is no miser when one lives always in the now.

when I consider the body that entraps my spirit, I recall my days as a Wolf, and know them not as a few but as a season of living. There is a comfort in their recalling, as well as a temptation. 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.

I wondered if there was any way to live amongst other people and refuse to be harnessed by their expectations and dependencies.

There was a sort of peace to being still and alone. I was learning to cultivate an emptiness of spirit. I could now go for long stretches without thinking of anything in particular. It made my endless waiting less painful.

Diplomacy may very well be the art of manipulating secrets. What would any negotiation come to, were not there secrets to either share or withhold?

it is in the manipulation of that secret knowledge that the hardest bargain is driven.

I had always believed, perhaps childishly, that if you followed the rules, you would be protected, that things like that would not happen to you. Afterward, I felt … tricked. Foolish. Gullible, that I had thought ideals could protect me. Honor and courtesy and justice … they are not real, Fitz. We all pretend to them, and hold them up like shields. But they guard only against folk who carry the same shields. Against those who have discarded them, they are no shields at all, but only additional weapons to use against their victims.”