Renegade's Magic Quotes

“Anticipating pain was like enduring it twice. Why not anticipate pleasure instead?”
― Robin Hobb, Renegade's Magic

“It was hard to reconcile the drumbeats and lifted voices in the night with my memories of flames and the screams of dying men. How could humanity range so effortlessly from the sublime to the savage and back again?”
― Robin Hobb, Renegade's Magic

“As I apologized to her a flicker of panic raced through me and then faded away. There wasn't enough life left in me to panic. I'd made a mistake and I was dying. Apparently not even a Speck afterlife was available to me. I'd simply stop being. Apparently I hadn't died correctly. Oops.”
― Robin Hobb, Renegade's Magic

“All my life, I'd been accustomed to thinking of life as things that moved: rabbits, dogs, fish, other people. Life that mattered had been life like me, life that breathed and bled, life that ate and slept. I'd been aware of that other layer of life, of the still but living things that supported it all, but I'd thought of it as the lower layer, as the less important stratum of life. Empty prairie was for plowing or grazing; land that was too poor for farming or cattle was wasteland. I'd never lived near a forest like this, but when I'd come to one, I'd understood why it existed. The trees were to be taken for lumber. The land had to be cleared to become useful. The idea that forest or prairie or even wasteland should be left as it was had never occurred to me. What good was land until it was tamed? What good was a piece of earth that did not grow wheat or fruit or grass for cattle? The value of every bit of land I'd ever trodden, I'd reckoned in terms of how it could benefit a man. Now I saw it with the eyes of a forest mage. Here life balanced as it had for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Sunlight and water were all that was required for the trees to grow. The trees made the food that fed not only whatever moving creatures might venture through this territory, but also became the food that replenished the soil when their leaves fell to rot back into earth. This working system was as refined and precise as any piece of clockwork ever engineered by man. It worked perfectly.”
― Robin Hobb, Renegade's Magic

“I could not help but see the hand of the balancer in all of this. Could hatred and determination be a counterweight to organization and experience? I suddenly understood something about the old god of death and why he was also the god of balances.”
― Robin Hobb, Renegade's Magic

“I had always thought that beyond the mountains, our king would find only primitive tribes to trade with. But here we were sitting down to a rustic picnic served on glass and ceramic dishes brought to us by servants of some master who operated a food booth. I felt anger at myself that I had so misread the Specks and their trading partners. The culture and civilization on this side of the mountains might be vastly different from Gernia, but I was coming to see that it was no less sophisticated and organized. I’d been blinded, I decided, by my attitudes about technology. These people who walked naked in the forest and lived so simply by summer enjoyed all the trappings of a different sort of civilization in winter. Obviously these people had followed a different path, but my assumptions that they were lesser, that they were simple primitive folk in desperate need of Gernian civilizing, reflected only my own ignorance.”
― Robin Hobb, Renegade's Magic

“It bothered me that Soldier’s Boy could so seemingly put the threat to Likari out of his mind.
Thinking about it would not make the threat any less.
I felt that thought pushed at me from him and grudgingly accepted it. He didn’t like that Orandula had threatened the boy. He was simply more capable of setting such a threat aside until a time when he could do something about it. All of my worry had never solved anything.”
― Robin Hobb, Renegade's Magic

“There must be some way to resolve this. Some way to make the Gernians leave our lands and stop cutting our ancestor trees.”
For a moment, Epiny just looked at me silently. Then she cocked her head, leaned closer to me, and said, Nevare?” in a cautious voice.
“What?”
She reached across to me and set her hand on mine. “You are Nevare?”
“Of course I am. Why? What?”
“You said ‘our lands’ and ‘our ancestor trees’ as if you were a Speck.”
I sighed. “Did I? I share Soldier’s Boy’s thoughts so much. And sometimes, what he thinks makes a lot of sense to me. It’s not comfortable to see both sides so clearly, Epiny. I can never retreat to feeling right or justified about anything. The Gernians are wrong to cut the trees without taking the Speck’s belief’s into consideration. The Speck’s are wrong to sow disease and deluge the Gernians with misery.”
“But we committed the first wrong. We came into their land and took it from them.”
“They took it from the Kidona.”
“What?”
“They took those lands from the Kidona. Took the lands and forced a settled folk to become nomads. And then did all they could to destroy the magic of the Kidona and deny them access to the spirit world.”
“What?”
I shook my head. “It’s that—no matter how far you go back, someone took the land from someone else. I don’t think anything can be solved by trying to work out who stole it first. The solution is in the future, Epiny, not the past.”
― Robin Hobb, Renegade's Magic

“How is Olikea usually named to you?”
“Olikea.”
“You do not call her ‘Mother’ ever?”
This seemed to puzzle him. “A ‘mother’ is what she is, not who she is,” he said after a time.”
― Robin Hobb, Renegade's Magic

“I became an observer of my own life.”
― Robin Hobb, Renegade's Magic

“Epiny! I’m fading. I’m sorry. I did what I thought was wise, but it helped no one. Not even me. Farewell. I loved all of you the best that I could. Get away if you can. Get all of you away.”
Suddenly I was in my body looking up at Epiny. I think she saw me in Soldier’s Boy’s eyes, because she said softly, “You stopped him from killing me. Remember that you could do that. Believe you’ll eventually find that strength again, that you’ll master him again. Until then, I'm sorry, Nevare. I’m sure you’d do the same thing in my place. And you know, you really deserve this.”
She lifted the hatchet from my throat, but before I could stir, she reversed her grip on it. The blunt end of it hit me squarely between the eyes, and I knew nothing more.”
― Robin Hobb, Renegade's Magic

“Shall I go down whimpering and begging for mercy? I doubt any would be shown. If I must lose it all, then at least I’ll extract a price from them. They’ll know I was here; I won’t be stepped on like an ant.”
The desperate courage in her words moved me. “You should have been your father’s soldier son,” I told her quietly.”
― Robin Hobb, Renegade's Magic

“Slowly it broke through my foggy brain that I was going to live. I felt a pang of regret at that, strange to say. I had not planned to die nor especially enjoyed the prospect, but it had been invitingly simple. All of my worries would have been over: no more wondering if I was doing the right thing. Now I was back in a world where people had expectations of me.”
― Robin Hobb, Renegade's Magic

“I was, I discovered, tired of feeling. I’d had enough of hurt and betrayal and despair.”
― Robin Hobb, Renegade's Magic

“I felt like a curtain was rising in my mind. The time for trying to reason with either people was gone; it was time for me to simply destroy the road. It was a very rudimentary strategy, but I still felt a lift in my spirits to have devised it. I felt a bit foolish as well. Why had I not found this determination before now? The answer to that was easy. Even if I now knew what I wished to do, I had very few ideas of how to implement my plans. There was small sense in planning to do a task that seemed impossible. Impossible for an ordinary man with ordinary means.”
― Robin Hobb, Renegade's Magic

“How can you know so many things and nothing at all? Why do you persist in being divided against yourself? How can you look at something and not see it? No one understands this about you. You use the magic with reckless power that in all my time I have never witnessed. Yet when the truth is right before you, you cannot see it.”
― Robin Hobb, Renegade's Magic

“Isn’t the tree you? Why would you do this to me?” I felt woozy and betrayed.
“The tree is not me. I live within the tree’s life, but I am not the tree and the tree is not me.”
“It tried to eat me.”
“It tried to live. All things try to live.”
― Robin Hobb, Renegade's Magic