Robin Hobb

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

“Fantasy encompasses a wide, wide spectrum of writing. We have beast fables, we have gothics, we have tales of vampires and werewolves, and we have sword and sorcery; we have epics from Homer, and there is just so much out there that we put under the umbrella of 'fantasy.'”

“The problem is not that we forget the past. It is that we recall it too well. Children recall wrongs that enemies did to their grandfathers, and blame the granddaughters of the old enemies. Children are not born with memories of those who insulted their mother or slew their grandfather or stole their land. Those hates are bequeathed to them, taught them, breathed into them. If adults didn't tell their children of their hereditary hates, perhaps we would do better.”

“The days we shared I alone would remember now.I suddenly felt less real.”

“If one bad thing befell me, I immediately linked it to every bad thing that had happened in the last week or might happen in the coming week. And when I became sad, I was prone to wallow in grief, piling up my woes and sprawling on them like a dragon on a hoard.”

“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.”

“It's too late to apologize for I have already forgiven you." -FitzChivalry Farseer”

“As dye soaks fibres, drawn into them to change their colour forever, so does a memory, stinging or sweet, change the fibre of a man’s character.”

“We were both smiling, in that bittersweet way one does when imagining something the heart longs for and the head would dread.”

“I think when writers play with dragons, we are simply doing what fantasy writers have always done.”

“Those were some astounding lies, cub. And the very last one the most inspired of all. You have your father's talent for it.”

“...once students have been taught that learning is tedious, difficult, and useless, they will never learn another lesson.”

“I was lonely, and a lonely heart has hungers that can overpower both common sense and dignity.”

“I think it was always okay to be a geek.”

“She had come to letters late in her life, and though she had mastered them, they had never become her good friends.”

“It was as if I had been following a narrow trail, and had suddenly realized that at any time I could leave it and strike out cross-country.”

“History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.”

“Sometimes people ask if my books have morals or lessons for readers, and I shudder at that thought. I always say that I have more questions than answers.”

“To be part of a family, or any community, is to have duties and responsibility, to be bound by the rules of that group.”

“...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.”