Assassin's Apprentice (The Farseer Trilogy, #1)

by Robin Hobb

Is it the nature of the world that all things seek a rhythm, and in that rhythm a sort of peace? Certainly it has always seemed so to me. All events, no matter how earthshaking or bizarre, are diluted within moments of their occurrence by the continuance of the necessary routines of day-to-day living. Men walking a battlefield to search for wounded among the dead will still stop to cough, to blow their noses, still lift their eyes to watch a V of geese in flight. I have seen farmers continue their plowing and planting, heedless of armies clashing but a few miles away.

I stood and watched as the old King departed the hall. I felt an echoing loss. Strange man. Bastard though I was, he could have declared himself my grandfather, and had for the asking what he instead chose to buy.

There was something more than jealousy in his tone. I have since come to know that many men always see another’s good fortune as a slight to themselves.

“I’m not a real prince. I’m a bastard.” It came oddly from my mouth, that word I heard so often and so seldom said. Burrich sighed softly. “Be your blood, boy, and ignore what anyone else thinks of you.” “Sometimes I get tired of doing the hard things.” “So do I.”

“Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too.”

“When you spring to an idea, and decide it is truth, without evidence, you blind yourself to other possibilities.

Not for the first time I realized he considered me slightly slow. My silences he mistook for a lack of wit rather than a lack of any need to speak.

The imperial hand is about to reconcile their differences. They must both be left wishing they had never had any differences at all. That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in such a way that there is no need for its intervention.”

Chade said it was a lack in him, that he didn’t make his men feel their importance to him. I think he believed that if anything significant had happened to me, someone would have told him. He had a bluff heartiness to him that I enjoyed, an attitude that things must be going well unless someone had told him otherwise.

I relate

Now, I’ve had boys of my own, and I know boys aren’t that way. They don’t learn, or grow, or have manners when you’re looking at them. But turn away, and turn back, and there they are, smarter, taller, and charming everyone but their own mothers.”

“Very little worth knowing is taught by fear,”

“It’s a poor teacher who tries to instruct by blows and threats. Imagine taming a horse that way. Or a dog. Even the most knot-headed dog learns better from an open hand than a stick.”