Fool's Errand (Tawny Man, #1)

by Robin Hobb

“When you cut pieces from the truth to avoid sounding like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead.”

The truth, I discovered, is a tree that grows as a man gains access to experience. A child sees the acorn of his daily life, but a man looks back on the oak.

Because ultimately, death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Death is what you get when there are no choices left to make.

you imagine the worst, and when you do, your mind stops at the problem and does not consider the solution.”

Life is a balance. We tend to forget that as we go blithely from day to day. We eat and drink and sleep and assume that we will always rise up the next day, that meals and rest will always replenish us. Injuries we expect to heal, and pain to lessen as times goes by. Even when we are faced with wounds that heal more slowly, with pain that lessens by day only to return in full force at nightfall, even when sleep does not leave us rested, we still expect that somehow tomorrow all will come back into balance and that we will go on. At some point, the exquisite balance has tipped, and despite all our flailing efforts, we begin the slow fall from the body that maintains itself to the body that struggles, nails clawing, to cling to what it used to be.

History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.