1
...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 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. There's just no telling what you'll becomeRobin Hobb
2
Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever. .Robin Hobb
3
I think that old magic draws much of its strength from that acknowledgment: that we are a part of that world.Robin Hobb
4
There is nothing dishonorable about abandoning pain. Sometimes peace is most quickly found when a man simply stops avoiding it.Robin Hobb
5
Leave off sniffing the carcass of your old life-do you enjoy unending pain? There is no shame in walking away from bones. 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.Robin Hobb
6
Leave old pains alone. When they cease coming to call, do not invite them back.Robin Hobb
7
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 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 time goes by. Even when we are faced with wounds that heal more slowly, with pain that lessens by day only to return in full force at nightfall, even when sleep does not leave us rested, we still expect that somehow tomorrow will all come back into balance and that we will go on. At some point, the exquisite balance has tipped, and despite all our flailing efforts, we begin the slow fall from the body that maintains itself to the body that struggles, nails clawing, to cling to what it used to be.Robin Hobb
8
As much as I had always longed to be freed of my duties and obligations, being released from such bonds was as much a severing as an emancipation.Robin Hobb
9
The past is no further away than the last breath you took.Robin Hobb
10
Stop longing. You poison today’s ease, reaching always for tomorrow.Robin Hobb
11
And what do you believe?” A slow smile spread over his face. “I believe in you. You are my new beginning.Robin Hobb
12
...I've returned and I look around me and think, I've missed my life. While I was off and alone, it went on here, without me, and I'm forever doomed to be a stranger in my own home.Robin Hobb
13
A while later, I lingered in the hinterlands of sleep. 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.Robin Hobb
14
Regrets are useless, " the Fool replied. "All you can do is start from where you are.Robin Hobb
15
Despite my pain, I felt not the regret of an ending, but the foreboding of a beginning.Robin Hobb