Assassin's Quest (The Farseer Trilogy, #3)

by Robin Hobb

Perhaps there can be no thanks nor any blame, but only recognition of the forces that brought us and bound us to our inevitable fates.

“Oh, Fitz, Fitz, my boy,” he said in a voice full of relief. “I thought we had lost you. I thought we’d done something worse than let you die.” His old arms were tight and strong about me. I was kind to the old man. I did not tell him that they had.

Have you ever considered what it would do to me if you died? Nighteyes asked me.

To hunt that one is as wise as to go hunting a porcupine. I cannot leave this alone, Nighteyes. I understand. I am the same about porcupines.

Someday is someday, and maybe it will be or maybe it won’t. This is a human thing, to worry about things that may or may not come to be.

You are all I have, I told him, full of melancholy. He yawned lazily. And I am all you need. Now go to sleep. Sleeping is serious, he told me gravely.

One does not have to be Witted to know the companionship of a beast, and to know that the friendship of an animal is every bit as rich and complicated as that of a man or woman.

Then I thought about it and wondered if I would ever reach a place in which I ceased finding out how stupid I could be.

It seemed terribly unlucky to have all of one’s friends believe one to be dead.

I am always with you, brother. You may not always be aware of me, but I am always with you. We are one.

“And so I shall follow you. For great events seem to happen in your wake.”

But for here, for now, just between us two, and for no other reason save I am me and you are you, I tell you this. I am glad, glad that you are alive. To see you take breath puts the breath back in my lungs. If there must be another my fate is twined around, I am glad it is you.”

Children, I have found, are much more swift to accept the unusual. They admit their curiosity, you see, rather than disdaining the object that arouses it.”

I fell asleep longing for words that did not exist.

I know of nothing more warming than hot meat and tea and good fellowship.

“You don’t know how to save yourself from yourself. How are you going to save the world?”

“I do not confuse what was done to you with who you are,”

“When you can either laugh or cry, you might as well laugh,”

A lock does no more than keep an honest man honest, you know.

“Despite all I’ve done to you, I loved you.”

A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding.