The Soldier Son Trilogy Bundle Quotes

“Shame is not a good emotion for a man to feel. It makes him angry as often as it makes him sorry.”
― Robin Hobb, The Soldier Son Trilogy Bundle

“But the forest elder lifted me higher still, and I saw the road not as a single stripe of death, but as a feeler reaching out from a foreign organism. The road was to that system, not a stripe of death but a root, securing it in new soil. And just as I had imagined the pathways and byways that would spread out from it as small rootlets, so they were. And if I followed that root back to its source, I saw the Kingdom of Gernia, growing and spreading just as organically as a vine crawling up a tree. The vine that used a tree to reach the sunlight did not intend evil to the tree; it was incidental that it sucked all life from the tree as it climbed and spread, shading the tree’s leaves with its own tendrils and foliage. The roads fed Gernia, and were focused only on sustaining their own organism. For Gernia to live, the road must grow. It could not survive without its growing, spreading roots. My civilization and the forest were two organisms, competing for resources. One would shade out the other.”
― Robin Hobb, The Soldier Son Trilogy Bundle

“No color was left in the day, save what the pallid moon would wring from the landscape. The road all around me was a flat, gray stripe of desert…No, not desert. No matter how barren a desert might appear to be, it had structure and life and connections. This road had none of those things. Dry, forsaken, it had no life of its own and severed the connections in all the lives it divided. I had thought that when I toiled in the graveyard, I dealt in death. In reality, there I had been part of the turning cycle of life and death and life. Here was true death; here all life ceased.”
― Robin Hobb, The Soldier Son Trilogy Bundle

“But I did not know what I was choosing. I only knew that I feared to die.” “None of us ever know what we are choosing when we choose life. If certainty is so important to you, then you should have chosen to be dead. That is a certain thing.” “Look at the life I am”
― Robin Hobb, The Soldier Son Trilogy Bundle

“I did not allow myself a morsel until I had divided every food on my plate into meticulously carved small bites. Then I began, eating each bite as if it were my last and trying to savor the taste in an attempt to make the small quantity satisfying. I had cut the meat so fine that I had reduced it to tiny bundles of fibers. I ground them between my back teeth and let them linger in my mouth until the flavor faded. I ate the peas individually, squeezing the tender insides out of their tiny jackets and savoring the difference in texture. I chewed the bread endlessly, delighted to discover that each tiny square somehow became sweet when it lingered on my tongue.”
― Robin Hobb, The Soldier Son Trilogy Bundle

“But this I do know of men, both young and old. When they are in groups, they are likelier to sink to the lowest acceptable behavior rather than rise to the highest possible standards. And this is especially true if there is no strong leader holding his men firmly accountable for their behavior. You will be living among your peers, and it will become easy for you to believe that your ethics are, perhaps, provincial or outdated if the young men around you are dissolute or self-indulgent. So I caution you, beware of those who mock goodness and self-discipline. Be wise in choosing your friends. Above all, be true to what you have been taught and to the honor of your family.”
― Robin Hobb, The Soldier Son Trilogy Bundle

“when all the things in my life seem to collide and contradict each other, I pick one set of facts and believe those, no matter what.” I lifted my eyes and met his as I asked him, “Do you blame me?”
― Robin Hobb, The Soldier Son Trilogy Bundle

“But this I do know of men, both young and old. When they are in groups, they are likelier to sink to the lowest acceptable behavior rather than rise to the highest possible standards.”
― Robin Hobb, The Soldier Son Trilogy Bundle

“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 whatever moving creatures might venture through this territory, and 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, The Complete Soldier Son Trilogy: Shaman's Crossing, Forest Mage, Renegade's Magic

“So I caution you, beware of those who mock goodness and self-discipline.”
― Robin Hobb, The Soldier Son Trilogy Bundle