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

by Robin Hobb

But Eda only knows what he’ll think is the right thing to do. Probably whatever hurts the most.”

I drifted into his mind and shared his dim dreams of an endless chase, pursuing a quarry I never saw, but whose hot scent dragged me onward through nettle, bramble, and scree.

“Don’t do what you can’t undo, until you’ve considered what you can’t do once you’ve done it.’

He preceded us home to Buckkeep, where he abdicated his claim to the throne.

I grew up fatherless and motherless in a court where all recognized me as a catalyst. And a catalyst I became.

And with those attributes went a predilection for the Skill,

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.

have since come to know that many men always see another’s good fortune as a slight to themselves.

Loneliness. It found me every night as I vainly tried to find a small and cozy spot in my big bed.

I would lie awake and wonder about my father and my mother, and how both could have dismissed me from their lives so easily.

Learning is never wrong. Even learning how to kill isn’t wrong. Or right. It’s just a thing to learn, a thing I can teach you. That’s all.

“Be your blood, boy, and ignore what anyone else thinks of you.” “Sometimes I get tired of doing the hard things.” “So do I.”

“I just want to do my best by you.”

At that age, I set my mind to how I would do a thing rather than why. And that, too, was a thing that I believe it was intended I learn: to obey without asking why an order was given.

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

I wanted to ask him why I should mourn for a father I had never even seen, for a father who had never come to see me,

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

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.”

In the matter of the Fool, that which we do not know is almost more significant than that which we do.

But there it is; sometimes luck belongs to children and madmen. That night I felt we were both.

Hard times are here, boy. And I wonder if they will ever pass.” In the years to come, I was to wonder that often.

“When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead.

I hated Burrich. Sometimes. He was overbearing, dictatorial, and insensitive. He expected me to be perfect, yet bluntly told me that I would never be rewarded for it. But he was also open, and blunt, and believed I could achieve what he demanded….

It made me realize how profoundly alone I had felt, and for how long.

Burrich gave more thought to naming a dog than that. We had no Blackies or Spots in the stables. Burrich named each beast as if they were royalty, with names that described them or traits he aspired to for them.

So I was to be taught by a man who was a murderer, a man who would try to kill me if he suspected I had the Wit.

Days of his belittling should have made me numb to his mockery. Instead, I came to believe much of what he said, and tried futilely to change.

The Skill does not care who wins. It does not allow anyone to surrender to any one thought, even for a moment. But I did. And when I did, I forgot to guard against the ecstasy that is both the honey and the sting of the Skill.

Such a man would become mindless, a great infant, speechless, sightless, soiling himself, forgetting thought, forgetting even food and drink, until he died. Such a one was beyond disgust.

Were I to throw myself from the tower roof, it would still not be enough to destroy my shame, but at least I need no longer be aware of it. I lay still and wept.

“No one is taught self-discipline by beating him half to death.”

“Very little worth knowing is taught by fear,” Burrich said stubbornly. And, more warmly: “It’s a poor teacher who tries to instruct by blows and threats.

An aloneness settled on me, a deadly melancholy that she never had been and never would be any more aware of me than she was of Smithy.

Nothing takes the heart out of a man more than the expectation of failure.

When considering a man’s motives, remember you must not measure his wheat with your bushel. He may not be using the same standard at all.”

“Too late to apologize. I have already forgiven you,” I heard myself say.