Robin Hobb

“For he was the Fool now, all of Lord Chance and Lady Amber and Lord Golden scraped away by sorrow. He was no one's Beloved now.”

“In the dead of night I stirred. Wakefulness flowed back into me. I was a cup full of sorrow, but that sorrow was stilled, like a pain that abates as long as one does not move.”

“I will always take your part, Bee. Right or wrong. That is why you must always take care to be right, lest you make your father a fool.”

“At what point is a person old enough to say, 'I own my body, and I get to do what I want with it'?”

“When has been disappointed for so long, hope becomes the enemy. One cannot be dashed to the earth unless one is lifted first, and I learned to avoid hope.”

“Fantasy is my genre and my home in the writing world. I consider it the biggest writing room in all literature, where there are literally no boundaries at all.”

“Sometimes I regret that the wonderful children's stories that have been made into movies were - people no longer read 'The Wizard of Oz'; they think they know the story. They don't know anything about all the bits and pieces they had to leave out.”

“Anticipating pain was like enduring it twice. Why not anticipate pleasure instead?”

“And what do you believe?”A slow smile spread over his face. “I believe in you. You are my new beginning.”

“But change proves that you are still alive. Change often measures our tolerance for folk different from ourselves. Can we accept their languages, their customs, their garments, and their foods into our own lives? If we can, then we form bonds, bonds that make wars less likely. If we cannot, if we believe that we must do things as we have always done them, then we must either fight to remain as we are, or die”

“There are endings. There are beginnings. Sometimes they coincide, with the ending of one thing marking the beginning of another. But sometimes there is simply a long space after an ending, a time when it seems everything else has ended and nothing else can ever begin.”

“I think it's really hard to draw a hard-and-fast line and say 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' doesn't count as science fiction or fantasy. Or at what point do we say mythology is not fantasy, so reading mythology when you're young does not count as an exposure to fantasy?”

“It was better to leave the space empty of words than to choose the wrong ones.”

“She had called herself a whore. That was a man's word, a shame-word flung at a woman. But she did not seem ashamed. She wielded the word like a sword, slicing away all his preconceptions of who she was. She had earned her living by her sex, and she did not seem to regret it.”

“His absence seemed a solid thing, a burden I must carry in addition to my grief... Yet I knew I would continue to live. Sometimes that knowledge seemed the worst part of my loss.”

“The knowledge that he had left me with no intent ever to return had come over me in tiny droplets of realization spread over the years. And each droplet of comprehension brought its own small measure of hurt.”

“To sate your need without love is theft”

“Everything she sang was true. I will leave it to you as to whether the truth can exist with details omitted, or if those lacks make a lie of it.”

“...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 become”

“For the weakest has but to try his strength to find it, and then he shall be strong.”