Forest Mage Quotes

“None of us ever know what we are choosing when we choose life. If certainty is so important to you, than you should have chosen to be dead. That is a certain thing.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“A leaf turns in the wind, and you suddenly have a different perception of what colour it is.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“Boredom is vastly underrated. Boredom means that nothing is trying to kill you every day.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“It was all so meaningless when I looked at it that way. It was meaningless in the same way as when I stood up from a game and then looked down on the scatter of playing pieces, and realized that they all were just bits of polished stone on a wooden board marked with squares. All the meaning they'd had moments before when I'd been trying to win a game were meanings that I'd imbued them with. Of themselves, neither they nor the board had any significance.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“Any future can be!” she replied, laughing at me. “If it were not so, if it were fixed, it would be a past. You say a foolish thing. How can a future be impossible?”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“Isolation was better than shame. I would continue on my own. This was my fight and no one else”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“They need other people to make them think they’re alive. They only feel like they’re important if someone else tells them they are.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“Go home, Spink. Tell Epiny I love her, and tell her to stop defending me in public. Tell Amzil the same.”
“That you love her?” He seemed incredulous.
“Why not?” I replied recklessly. “I can scarcely lose anything by saying it now.”
“I’ll do it, then,” he said, and seemed almost pleased at the prospect.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“Spink arrived by midmorning. When I heard his step in the corridor, I went to the window of my cell. Over one arm, he carried my spare uniform, freshly mended, washed, and pressed. The glint in his eyes warned me that he was still angry about my earlier comments about Epiny. What I had to say to him today would please him even less, I thought. I might have only one chance to bring up the topic.
So I greeted him with, “Epiny plans to use explosives to stop the road crews from cutting the Speck’s ancestor trees.”
He stopped dead and stared at me. Then he turned to the guard who had been outside my range of vision. “Bring this man more water and a razor! He cannot be presented to the court this way. We have the dignity of these proceedings to consider.”
“Sir, he may do himself an injury with a razor.”
“And how much would the court care about that? Less, I think, than having an unshaven bumpkin presented to them as a soldier facing trial. Corporal, this is still our regiment. Doubtless this man will exit it one way or another in the next few days. Let’s have him leave looking somewhat like a soldier, shall we?”
“Yes, sir,” was the daunted response. I listened to the scuff of his boots as he left.
Outside my door, Spink gave a sudden sigh. “I shall hope I can pass your greeting off as lunatic raving. How are you feeling?”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“I did. I hope the guard thought it was gibberish. And you obviously expect me to be surprised by it. Nevare, it grieves me that you don’t understand at all the depth of love and trust that exists between Epiny and me. You think she had concealed this from me, don’t you?”
I was left speechless. It had been inconceivable to me that Epiny would go home and confide her intentions to Spink. He was right. I had no concept of the connection between them.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“I shouldn’t have brought you this way, Epiny. Most of the men on these crews are prisoners. And their guards don’t strike me as much better.”
“Actually, I think this is the best way you could have guided me, Nevare. It will give me an opportunity to see how they are working, and where, and what they are using. This is information that will help me stop them.”
She was patting her hair back into order and brushing at her skirts as she spoke. She was tidying herself, I realized, before she walked out to meet the road crew.
“Epiny, what can you possibly do to stop them?” I asked in a low voice.
“I was thinking explosives,” she replied brightly. “I’ve heard they’ve been using them to fell trees. Perhaps they’d work to make them stop felling trees.”
“Oh, the good god’s mercy on us all! Epiny, let that idea go. All you’ll do is succeed at hurting yourself or others. Where would you get explosives, anyway?”
She turned and gave me a sly smile. “Have you forgotten? My husband is in charge of supply.”
Then she lifted her hand from mine. All around me, the forest sparkled unbearably and then dissolved into floating dust. A moment later, I was staring up at the ceiling of my cell. I groaned and covered my eyes.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“Drink some water and rest for a bit before we go on. I’m amazed that a woman in your condition could make this hike at all.”
She followed my suggestion, but as she worked her way down the steep path, she asked me, “So you are one of those men who think pregnancy is a ‘diseased state’? You can’t even bring yourself to say ‘pregnant,’ can you?”
“I was afraid you’d consider it rude.” Even to myself, I sounded priggish.
Tires and scared as she was, she still managed a small laugh. “It’s only rude because you think how I got this way is something shameful. Well-bred women shouldn’t be pregnant. Isn’t that true?”
I thought over her words, and then had to laugh with her. “You make me think about how I think about things, Epiny. You’re one of the few people in my life who can make me do that.”
“If we both live through this, I intend to do a lot more of it. At this rate, I fear I will never have time to scold you properly for how badly you treated me by concealing that you were still alive. I want you to know I’m putting it off until it’s more convenient. I have not forgiven you.”
“There, through those trees—see it? That’s the stream.” I forced myself to add. “I probably don’t deserve to be forgiven for that. I don’t expect it.”
She halted for an instant and then stumped her way down to the stream, complaining as she went. “And that is probably the only thing you could have said that would make me instantly forgive you, no matter how much you deserve to endure my disdain and contempt for, well, at least months!”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“And if you have my baby, Olikea? What then?”
“Your baby? Your baby?” She laughed. “Men do not have babies. Women do. Your baby.” She chortled again. “When I have my baby, if it is a daughter, then I will celebrate and reward you. And if it is a boy,” she puffed her cheeks briefly, “I will try again.”
Her words gave me plenty of food for thought for several nights. I remember a saying my father had: “Don’t measure my wheat with your bushel.” He’d used it whenever our opinions differed so much that I could not predict what he was likely to do next. It suddenly seemed that was what I’d been doing with Olikea. The Specks had a strange set of values, and I decided that despite my continued contact with them, I knew very little of their ways.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“Olikea, my father has discarded me from his household. I doubt I can ever return there as a respected son, and I will not return there as anything less. But even if I could, I could not take you with me. He would not accept you. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“I do not understand why you think I would wish to go there.” She was genuinely puzzled. “Or why I would allow you to take me there. Am I sack that you would carry off?”
I perceived that I would have to be even blunter. “I can never marry you, Olikea. You can never stand beside me as my—” I searched for the Speck word and found I did not know one. I used the Gernian instead. “Wife. You can never be my wife.”
She leaned up on top of me to look down into my face. “What is that? Wife?”
I smiled sadly. “Wife is the woman who will live with me for the rest of my life. The woman who will share my home and fortunes. The woman who will have my children.”
“Oh, I will have my children,” she assured me calmly. She lay back beside me. “A daughter, it is hoped. But I do not like your home, out there in the bare lands. You may keep it. As for fortune, I have my own fortune, so I do not need yours. You may keep it.”
Her calm assurance that she would have my child unnerved me. “I don’t love you, Olikea,” I burst out. “You are beautiful and you are seductive and you are kind to me. But I do not think we truly knew one another. I do not think we share anything beyond this passion for the moment.”
“I share food with you,” she pointed out reasonably. She stretched and then settled herself more comfortably beside me. “Food. Mating.” She sighed, pleases with herself. “If a woman gives these things to a man, then he is fortunate and he should not ask for more from her. Because,” she added in a tone between teasing and warning, “more than those things, he will not get. Though he may earn her displeasure by asking.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“Olikea, my father has discarded me from his household. I doubt I can ever return there as a respected son, and I will not return there as anything less. But even if I could, I could not take you with me. He would not accept you. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“I do not understand why you think I would wish to go there.” She was genuinely puzzled. “Or why I would allow you to take me there. Am I sack that you would carry off?”
I perceived that I would have to be even blunter. “I can never marry you, Olikea. You can never stand beside me as my—” I searched for the Speck word and found I did not know one. I used the Gernian instead. “Wife. You can never be my wife.”
She leaned up on top of me to look down into my face. “What is that? Wife?”
I smiled sadly. “Wife is the woman who will live with me for the rest of my life. The woman who will share my home and fortunes. The woman who will have my children.”
“Oh, I will my children,” she assured me calmly. She lay back beside me. “A daughter, it is hoped. But I do not like your home, out there in the bare lands. You may keep it. As for fortune, I have my own fortune, so I do not need yours. You may keep it.”
Her calm assurance that she would have my child unnerved me. “I don’t love you, Olikea,” I burst out. “You are beautiful and you are seductive and you are kind to me. But I do not think we truly knew one another. I do not think we share anything beyond this passion for the moment.”
“I share food with you,” she pointed out reasonably. She stretched and then settled herself more comfortably beside me. “Food. Mating.” She sighed, pleases with herself. “If a woman gives these things to a man, then he is fortunate and he should not ask for more from her. Because,” she added in a tone between teasing and warning, “more than those things, he will not get. Though he may earn her displeasure by asking.”
― Robin hobb, Forest Mage

“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said! Always you ask me, What do you mean? You hear my words. When you don’t understand them, it is because you do not wish to understand them. It is the same way you resist the magic. Why?”
I didn’t even have to think of a reply. “Perhaps I want to have my own life, the way I envisioned it, the way it was promised to me! Lisana, from the time I was small, I was raised to be a soldier. I expected to go to the academy, to be well educated, to become an officer and distinguish myself in battle, to have a lovely wife and children, and eventually to return home and retire with honor. The magic took all of that away from me. And what has it given me? A fat body that is awkward and ugly to live in. A power that comes and goes, that I don’t know how to use or control. What good has it done me?”
She looked at me sadly for a moment. She lifted her arms as if to display her body to me. “Awkward and ugly,” she said, and when she took the words to herself, it cut like a knife that I had uttered them.
“I didn’t mean—” I cried out, but “Hush!” she scolded me. “I do not pretend that I don’t understand what you say! I know what you meant. What good has the magic done you, you asked. I could say that through it, you came to know me. And you have come to know the forest in a way you could never have before. But the real answer is that the magic is not for your good, and so it does not matter if it does things that make you happy or not.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said! Always you ask me, What do you mean? You hear my words. When you don’t understand them, it is because you do not wish to understand them. It is the same way you resist the magic. Why?”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“We need to get you out of the gate as quickly as possible, and then hope the darkness will hide you.”
I stood gaping at her. When she finally ran out of words, she scowled up at me and asked, “What are you waiting for? We’re losing what time we have.”
“Why are you doing this?”
She stared at me for a moment, lost for words. Then she said with indescribable scorn, The mistress is right. You are an idiot. Let’s go.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“While there is life, there is hope.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“But we both know that things never remain as they are, Epiny. It’s a lost cause already.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“You should just say it and get it over with, Nevare. It’s my fault that you’re in that cell facing death. I betrayed you. I’m so sorry! So sorry.”
“Oh Epiny, I didn’t mean it that way! You didn’t betray me. All you did was what you thought you should do, keep faith with a man you trusted. And maybe by his own lights, he was a good man. If he believed me such a monster and a threat to the women of the town, then maybe he was justified in sending those men after me. It’s all about what we believe, isn’t it? Not just the Gernians and Specks, but even down to individuals like Hoster and you. All we can do is what we think is right, driven by what we know, or what we think we know.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“He dismissed my concern, and said that he thought less of me for having it. He’d heard it before. He saw it as superstitious nonsense, and said that once the trees were gone and nothing bad happened to the Specks, they’d see they’d been foolish and come around to our way of thinking. It was as if he believed that if we took their culture away from them, they’d instantly convert to thinking like Gernians. As if our way of seeing the world were the only real one, and that anyone, given the opportunity, would think like we do. I couldn’t make him see any other point of view. Even if I’d told him that the trees were actually the Speck’s ancestors, he’d have been unable to believe me. But yes, we knew those trees were sacred to the Specks. We’ve evidently known it for a long time. And we keep trying to cut through there anyway.”
“We’ve been fools! Couldn’t someone, for just a moment, have believed the Specks knew the secrets of their forest better than we did? We’ve brought all this on ourselves! The fear, the despair, the Speck plague! It’s all our own doing.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“I held you over the abyss and told you that you must choose. I told you that you must say you wished to be taken up to this life. And you said you did, and I brought you here.”
“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, than you should have chosen to be dead. That is a certain thing.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“I will do better,” I said aloud, and the words surprised a feeble smile out of Epiny.
“You had better,” she warned me, “for I can’t imagine what you would have to do in order to do worse.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“A man wants more than kindly affection from a woman. He wants all of her.”
She puffed her lips at me again. “That is a stupid thing to want. Only a woman can have all of herself. You should be happy with what any woman offers you, rather than to want everything she is. Do you offer all you are to any one woman? I doubt it.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“Feelings, I discovered, did not yield to logic or even to ethics. Why should everyone at the relay station suffer because their sergeant had been so stiff-necked? Why should any of them suffer at all, at my say-so? Who was I to judge them?
I chased my morality in circles that night, trying to find it. When it came to actually living as an upright man, I discovered that I was no more truly tolerant and forgiving than any worshipper of the old gods.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“They got a whole different way of seeing the world, a whole different idea of how life works. And once they take you in, suddenly it seems that it’s the only way of seeing things. They just accept the magic. They don’t go around thinking that they’re going to decide how their lives go. They laugh at us for that. Once, that woman showed me a little plant growing by a stream. She said, ‘You see that little plant, all by itself, having its own life?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I see it.’ And she said, ‘That’s you. And you see that other little plant over there, on the other side of the stream? You see it, all by itself over there? That’s me.’
“So I thought she was trying to tell me something, about how the stream separated us, about how different we were. But then she went over and grabbed the plant that was me and she pulled it up out of the ground. But its tough little roots came with it. And she started following that root, lifting it up out of the ground, and that root went from my plant to another to another and to another and finally it went right under the stream and come up on the other side and she pulled it up and it went to the plant she said was her. And she stood there, holding up all this network of roots, and she said, ‘See. There isn’t one little plant growing alone. It’s all of us.’”
He fell silent, palm up and empty, reached out toward me, waiting for a response. He seemed terribly moved by what he had told me. “It’s a nice story,” I said at last. “But I don’t see how it helps me understand whatever it is you’re trying to say.”
He shook his head at me in disgust and went back to sit in his chair. “For her, it’s not a metaphor. It’s reality. She truly believes that we are connected to one another and that in some way we are all part of one big…something.”
“Some big what?”
“We don’t have a word for it. She’s told me about it a hundred times, but her truth is in a place where our words don’t reach.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“I wanted to tell her that somehow we would find a way through the difficulties we now faced. I knew that someday we would again have a life that seemed normal and routine, even boring. Boring sounded so attractive to me now. I tried to imagine a day when a dozen problems didn’t confront me and sorrow did not weight my every breath. I could not conceive of it.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“Thanks for listening to me, Sergeant Duril. I don’t think anyone else would have believed me.”
“Well, sometimes it’s flattering to have someone want to tell you something.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage

“There’s more than one way to look at the world. That’s what I was getting at, about the magic. To us, it’s magic. Maybe to someone else, it’s as natural as rain falling from clouds. And maybe to them, some of what we do is magic because it doesn’t make reasonable sense in their world. Do you get what I’m trying to tell you?”
― Robin hobb, Forest Mage

“Much as we resent that, it was natural that once they had achieved a military technology that was superior to our own, they would take what they wished from us.”
― Robin Hobb, Forest Mage