Fool's Assassin (The Fitz and the Fool, #1)

by Robin Hobb

I have Molly. And truly, she’s enough for me. She’s my home.”

There are endings. There are beginnings. Sometimes they coincide, with the ending of one thing marking the beginning of another. But sometimes there is simply a long space after an ending, a time when it seems everything has ended and nothing else can ever begin.

When we are children, we believe that our elders know all and that even when we cannot understand the world, they can make sense of it. Even after we are grown, in moments of fear or sorrow, we still turn instinctively to the older generation, hoping to finally learn some great hidden lesson about death and pain. Only to learn instead that the only lesson is that life goes on.

That, I think, is the shock of any relationship ending. It is realizing that what is still an ongoing relationship to someone is, for the other person, something finished and done with.

Do not agonize about yesterday. Do not borrow tomorrow’s trouble. Let your heart hunt. Rest in the now.

We live in our bodies. An assault on that outside fortress of the mind leaves scars that may not show, but never heal.

I knit my brow and tried to comprehend my mother’s death, all over again. Every time I thought I had mastered it, some new manifestation of it would overwhelm me.