Fool's Errand (Tawny Man, #1)

by Robin Hobb

“Birthright?” I tried for a bitter laugh. “It’s more like a family disease, Chade. It’s a hunger, and when you are taught how to satisfy it, it becomes an addiction. An addiction that can become strong enough eventually to set your feet on the paths that lead past the Mountain Kingdom.

Sometimes I think there is more rest in that place between wakefulness and sleep than there is in true sleep. The mind walks in the twilight of both states, and finds the truths that are hidden alike by daylight and dreams. Things we are not ready to know abide in that place, awaiting that unguarded frame of mind.

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

“It doesn’t matter who a man’s father is. Your parents made a child, but it’s up to you to make the man you’ll be.”

“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.

Nor is there any special wisdom in injuring oneself over and over. What is your loyalty to that pain? To abandon it will not lessen you.

Leave old pains alone. When they cease coming to call, do not invite them back.”

“Death is always less painful and easier than life! You speak true. And yet we do not, day to day, choose death. 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. Am I right?”

Do you know how draining it can be, to strike poses when no one knows they are poses, to assume a whole different character when there is no one to appreciate how well I do it?”

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.

it’s strange, isn’t it, how you don’t know how big a part of you someone is until they’re threatened? And then you think that you can’t possibly go on if something happens to them, but the most frightening part is that, actually, you will go on, you’ll have to go on, with them or without them.

Battle makes the world a small place, makes all life no bigger than the sweep of your sword’s length.

So grief has always seemed to me, a time of waiting not for the hurt to pass, but to become accustomed to it.

The past is no further away than the last breath you took.