Robin Hobb book quotes

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Royal Assassin

There are 22 quotes listed in the Royal Assassin category:

A year passes for a wolf as a decade does for a man. Time is no miser when one lives always in the now.
narrator

This, more than anything else, is what I have never understood about your people. You can roll a dice, and understand that the whole game may hinge on one turn of a die. You deal out cards, and say that all a man's fortune for the night may turn upon one hand. But a man's whole life, you sniff at, and say, what, this nought of a human, this fisherman, this carpenter, this thief, this cook, why, what can they do in the great wide world? And so you putter and sputter your lives away, like candles burning in a draught.
the Fool

There is no place so dark as the open water at night.
narrator

Sometimes, it would be much easier to die for one's king than to give one's life for him.
Chade

Men of passion and vision are often seen as mad.
Kettricken

Wolves have no kings.
Nighteyes

Such packs men make. How can you hunt together when you cannot all run in the same direction?
Nighteyes

I mislike this mouse dust. But before I go, use your so clever hands to scratch inside my ears. It is hard for me to do well without leaving welts.
Nighteyes

Anything that must be done, can be done.
Chade

Lost a fight? The fight isn't over until you win it, Fitz.
Burrich

It is an odd language, yours. You speak of passing time as in the mountains we speak of passing wind. As if it were a thing to be rid of.
Kettricken

There's only one way to be drunk.
Molly

The most distinctive part of your fighting style is the incredible way you have of surviving it.
Verity

You forbid? You forbid? Forbid the wind to blow past your stone den then, or the grass to grow in the earth around it. You have as much right. You forbid.
Nighteyes

Know your heart before you do, Fitz. If you've nothing to offer her, let her go. Are you crippled? Only if you decide so. But if you're determined that you're a cripple now, then perhaps you've no right to go and seek her out. I don't think you'd want her pity. It's a poor substitute for love.
Burrich

Instead, I lay there and thought what a stupid boy I had been last summer. I had courted a woman, thinking that I was walking out with a girl. Those three years difference in age had mattered so much to me, but in all the wrong ways. I had thought she had seen me as a boy, and despaired of winning her. So I had acted like a boy, instead of trying to make her see me as a man. And the boy had hurt her, and yes, deceived her, and in all likelihood, lost her forever. The dark closed down, blackness everywhere but for one whirling spark.
She had loved the boy, and foreseen a life together for us. I clung to the spark and sank into sleep.
narrator

I felt my anger building to an unbearable heat. The wind whipped at my hair and sought to chill me, but I only strode faster, and felt the strength of my hatred grow hotter. It lured me and I followed it like the scent of fresh blood.
I turned a corner and found myself in the market. Threatened by the coming storm, the poorer merchants were packing up their goods from the blankets and mats. Those with stalls were fastening their shutters. I strode past them. People scuttled out of my way. I brushed past them, not caring how they stared.
I came to the animal vendor's stall, and stood face to face with myself. He was gaunt, with bleak dark eyes. He glared at me balefully, and the waves of hatred pulsing out from him washed over me in greeting. Our hearts beat to the same rhythm. I felt my upper lip twitch, as if to snarl up and bare my pitiful human teeth. I straightened my features, battened by emotion back under control. But the caged wolf cub with dirty grey coat stared up at me, and lifted his black lips to reveal all his teeth.
narrator

Come, hunt with me, the invitation whispers in my heart. Leave the pain behind and let your life be your own again. There is a place where all time is now, and the choices are simple and always your own.
Wolves have no kings.
narrator

Our own ambitions and tasks that we set for ourselves, the framework we attempt to impose upon the world is no more than a shadow of a tree cast across the snow. It will change as the sun moves, be swallowed in the night, sway with the wind and when the smooth snow vanishes, it will lie distorted upon the uneven earth. But the tree continues to be.
Kettricken

My heart is my own. I give it where I will.
Nighteyes

The man who must brag for himself knows that no one else will.
Celerity quoting her father Brawndy

Men it is who think they can rule others' lives but have no bonds to them. Do you think that to bond or not to bond is for you alone to decide?
Nighteyes