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

by Robin Hobb

“Just because a man can do a thing does not mean he should do a thing.”

Sometimes a man doesn’t know how badly he’s hurt until someone else probes the wound.”

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

“A tower seldom crumbles from the bottom up,” she told more than one, and claimed to have the saying from Prince Chivalry.

When humanity is freed of time, old wrongs can be corrected before they are done.”

knowledge that the hardest bargain is driven. There is no action that takes place between humans in which secrets do not play a part,

“Sometimes all the choices are poor ones, Fool, and still a man must choose.”

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.”

“If fate is some great wave that is going to bear me up and dash me against a wall, regardless of what I choose, why then I choose to do nothing.

“I take myself with me. That’s all I truly need, or own.” He

’Tis wiser far and much more brave To stay at home and face the grave.

there is no sense in trying to play that game with the past. Here is where we are today, and we can only make our moves from here.”

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.”

There is no more slippery task than to refrain from thinking of something.

I healed. Not completely. A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding.