Fool's Errand (Tawny Man, #1)

by Robin Hobb

Had it truly been a year since I had shoved a rock under the sagging porch step and promised myself I’d fix it later? No, it had been closer to a year and a half.

It would be far better for me to send this young man out into the world while we both still liked one another rather than wait until I was a burdensome duty to his young shoulders.

Silence can ask all the questions, where the tongue is prone to ask only the wrong one.

I put together a life for myself, and if it lacked much of what had been sweet in my old life, it also provided simple pleasures the old life had long denied me. I had been content.

I loved her, not as a person carefully chosen to share my life, but as a familiar part of my existence. To lose her would be like losing the hearth from the room.

I told myself I took no satisfaction in that, and went looking for Hap.

I wondered how long I would have to live before my secrets were so old that they no longer mattered.

The man who becomes most efficiently vicious first is most likely to be the man left standing. I had learned to be that man.

“We have to start from where we are.”

I had bumbled along with Hap, never really giving much thought to what I was or was not teaching him about being a man.

Cooking for one person seemed foolish, yet I forced myself to set out a decent meal and to eat it.

“A man is as he is made. A man can’t help how he’s made.”

Stop longing. You poison today’s ease, reaching always for tomorrow.

It was a boy’s thing to do, this immediate offering to share a prized possession, and my heart answered it, knowing that no matter how long or how far apart we had been, nothing important had changed between us.

What life showed me, in my years apart from the world, was that no man ever gets to know the whole of a truth. All I had once believed of all my experiences and myself, time alone illuminated anew. What had seemed clearly lit plunged into shadow, and details I had considered trivial leapt into prominence.

I have always believed that was the essence of boyhood: believing that mistakes could not be fatal.

When I wallow in something dead to reawaken the savor of it, you rebuke me.

Lmfao

“What was that? That was you, a dozen years hence, if you do not mend your ways.

Discontent washed through me again, and childishly I blamed him for it. If he had not come to see me, I would never have recalled how much I missed him.

Knowing there was nothing admirable about my attitude did nothing to improve it.

You can be the dead fish. I’ll be the old stick.

More personal worries found me and chewed on me.

“He’s a good boy,” I fervently agreed with her. “And he deserves a good chance at making something of himself. I’d do anything for him.”

The green jerkin had rather suffered from concealing the meat.

Girls of her age are like little kittens pouncing at grass to practice their hunting skills. They do not yet know the meaning of the motions they make.”