That is the challenge Companion. To take what has happened to you and learn from it. Nothing is quite so destructive as pity, especially self-pity. No event in life is so terrible that one cannot rise above it.
When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool you end up looking like a moron instead.
That no man can truly imagine being happy and that’s why happiness isn’t for sale here.
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.
It’s too late to apologize for I have already forgiven you.” -FitzChivalry Farseer
One had a knife. But I had a staff and was trained to use it.
One part braggart to one part coward. He would fear everyone he did not control. And the next day he would fear those he controlled even more.
A woman of many talents. And intelligent, too. He’d probably have to kill her soon.
I was amazed at how strong women were when they were angry.
Life is not a race to restore a past situation. Nor does one have to hurry to meet the future. Seeing how things change is what makes life interesting.
The world had to change and for some reason the prosperity of men always results in them taking ever more from wild creatures and places.
She had come to letters late in her life, and though she had mastered them, they had never become her good friends.
History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.
I think that old magic draws much of its strength from that acknowledgment: that we are a part of that world.
Humans could never accept the world as it was and live in it. They were always breaking it and living amongst the shattered pieces.
He longed for cleanliness and tidiness: it was hard to find peace in the middle of disorder.
Acceptance of what is. That is the shortest path to peace with yourself.
There is nothing dishonorable about abandoning pain. Sometimes peace is most quickly found when a man simply stops avoiding it.
Anticipating pain was like enduring it twice. Why not anticipate pleasure instead?
And the world re-ordered itself around me. I spoke each word carefully. ‘You are so stupid.
Had she learned to feel again, only to have to feel this? Could any amount of love ever be worth the pain of losing it?
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.
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.
Leave old pains alone. When they cease coming to call, do not invite them back.
It is the nature of human that we tend to pass our pain along. As if we could get rid of it by inflicting an equal hurt on someone else.
Do you not see how strange and wonderful that is? That all history balances on an affair of the human heart?
Isn’t it strange how wise counsel can cool the hottest head? He made sense but my heart screamed protest.
We were both smiling, in that bittersweet way one does when imagining something the heart longs for and the head would dread.
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.
Be very chary of telling your hoarded secrets. Many lose all power once they have been divulged.
Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there any more.
There would always be dishonorable things done to preserve the honor of any power.
Suspense was an excellent tool for keeping powerful people off balance. It gave one bargaining power.
One way to disperse fear and create decision was to consider the worst possible outcome of one’s actions.
There are always choices. But sometimes there are no good ones.
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.
Refuse anxiety. When you borrow trouble against what might be, you neglect the moment you have now to enjoy. The man who worries about what will next be happening to him loses this moment in dread of the next with pre-judgement
There was a danger in asking too much of a child, but the danger of asking too little was almost equal.
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.
Why must it be one or the other?’ she countered. ‘You are both a capable seaman and the son of a Bingtown Trader. Why should not I have both sets of skill?
For the weakest has but to try his strength to find it, and then he shall be strong.
That destiny is not reserved for a few chosen ones. Each man has a destiny. Recognizing it and fulfilling it are the purpose of a man’s life.
Many great ideas are not unique. They only become unique when the men who have the wherewithal actually to implement them come together.
One must plan for the future and anticipate the future without fearing the future.
Fool, there is no sense in trying to play that game with the past. Here is where we are today, and we can only make our moves from here.
Strange, how being left out of a secret always feels like a betrayal of trust.
To be part of a family, or any community, is to have duties and responsibility, to be bound by the rules of that group.
The days we shared I alone would remember now.I suddenly felt less real.
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.
Men cannot grieve as dogs do. But they grieve for many years.
Some part of me knew that was important. That once it would have mattered terribly to me.
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.
…You won’t even see what is put right on the table before you. Men. If it was raining soup you’d be out there with a fork.
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.
Every small, unselfish action nudges the world into a better path. An accumulation of small acts can change the world.
I was lonely, and a lonely heart has hungers that can overpower both common sense and dignity.
The past is no further away than the last breath you took.
They were all gone now, broken or taken by people who had no idea what such items represented. Let them go. She held the past in her heart, with no need of physical items to tie it down.
…there was no point in sighing after what I could not have. It only distracted me from what I did have.
Why does the forbidden always add that edge of sweetness?
If all of her was not enough for him, then let him have none of her and seek what he needed elsewhere.
…some secrets beg to be betrayed. The secret of undeclared love is like that.
…once students have been taught that learning is tedious, difficult, and useless, they will never learn another lesson.
Stop longing.You poison today’s ease, reaching always for tomorrow.
Perhaps there can be no thanks nor any blame, but only recognition of the forces that brought us and bound us to our inevitable fates.
As long as you believe it is impossible, you close your mind to understanding it.
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
Still I promise myself, “Next time I will do better” in the all-too-human conceit that I will always be offered a “next time.
And what do you believe?”A slow smile spread over his face. “I believe in you. You are my new beginning.
Somehow,” she said coldly, “you have confused profitable and not profitable for right and wrong. I, however, have not.
I’ll never miss a chance to remind you of what a brat you were. A gloriously beautiful and very spoiled brat. I was utterly charmed by your complete self-absorption. It was rather like courting a cat.
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.
How often does a man know, without question, that he has done well? I do not think it happens often in anyone’s life, and it becomes even rarer once one has a child.
I lied to hurt you. For letting him be dead while you lived. For being loved by him more than he loved me!He loved you more than he ever loved any of the rest of us!
Those were some astounding lies, cub. And the very last one the most inspired of all. You have your father’s talent for it.
Stop your whining. If you are frightened, be silent. Whining is for prey. It attracts predators. And you are not prey.
It was better to leave the space empty of words than to choose the wrong ones.
She is, Althea thought uneasily, what I pretend to be: a woman who does not let her sex deter her from living as she pleases.
…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.
Assassins take no pride in fighting fairly. We take pride in winning.
There are few things so tender as a man’s dignity.
and to die with the Warrior’s Prayer on his lips. For, ‘Yes’, he had sighed on his dying breath, and all knew that was the ultimate prayer one could offer to life. Acceptance.
Think of what is and don’t let what might have been distract you.
Open your eyes. This horrible mess is your life. There is no sense in waiting for it to get better. Stop putting it off and live it.
I was dying. And I had never been enough for anything.
Regrets are useless, ” the Fool replied. “All you can do is start from where you are.
Despite my pain, I felt not the regret of an ending, but the foreboding of a beginning.
If he ever wanted vengeance on me for all I did, he has it now. This is the worst thing he could do to me. Now I know how it feels to be left behind. As I left him.
As if he hadn’t always known he was loved the best. That he was the Beloved.
I could not make it right, but I could make someone pay for how wrong it had been.
This was misery that could not yield, for he sorrowed for a time he could not return to, and a self he would never again be.
One does not have to be Witted to know the companionship of a beast, and to know that the friendship of an animal is every bit as rich and complicated as that of a man or woman.
I don’t want to have these burdens. But I can’t bear to turn them over to anyone else, either. Because, despite all the work, I like being in control of my own life.
There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise. A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.
I think I made a better boy than I do a man, I admitted ruefully to the wolf. Why not wait until you’ve been at it a bit longer and then decide? he suggested.
I feared my own kind more than anything the natural world could ever threaten me with.
The fight isn’t over until you win it…That’s all you have to remember. No matter what the other man thinks.
It’s not the sort of thing one asks of a friend. He hasn’t offered, and I will not ask it. I will not tear him that way. I am trying to let go. I don’t know how.
Had they been dogs they would have sniffed me over and then drawn back. But humans have no such inbred courtesies.
Besides, if there were no dragons of flesh and blood and fire, whence would come the idea for these stone carvings?
I wanted us to share all our lives. You wish to keep me in a box, separate from your life. I cannot be someone you come to when you have nothing more important to do.
But in my heart, when I said “my king,” I meant Verity.
That is one thing that in all my years among your folk I have never become accustomed to. The great importance that you attach to what gender one is.
And like a child, I’d be testing the people who loved me, pulling away from them almost for the sole reason of seeing if anyone would come after me.
When you want a thing so badly for so long, and then it comes time to face that you cannot have it, sometimes—’‘Sometimes you can’t believe it when it comes to you. Sometimes you’re afraid to believe it. I understand your hesitation.
When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead.
Perhaps once one realised how deeply one could bond with a creature as foreign as a dragon, all forms of human love seemed more acceptable.
Did you feel that?’ I asked him.He smiled sadly. ‘Fitz, I have never needed to touch you to feel that. It was always there. No limits.
I wish they would all go away.Except the Fool. I wished he would join me. Somehow, I had always thought he would join me. Now, I could not recall why. Perhaps I had buried that in the stone.
He gave a final shake of his coat. I go to the hunt!
I should live each day as if it were significant, as if everyday the fate of the world depended on my action.
There was, she suddenly saw, many ways to be raped.
And so the Wolf of the West rose from the stone! And so he will rise again if ever the folk of the Six Duchies call to him in need.
Perhaps the greatest thing one can discover is that you can decide who you are. You don’t have to be whom the Ludlucks made you. You don’t even have to be who you were before that. You can choose. We are all creatures of our own devising.
But if she is alone now, it is because she chose to be alone, not someone decree if for her. Her life is hers to live, not yours to repair.
Boredom is vastly underrated. Boredom means that nothing is trying to kill you every day.
They regarded our passage not at all, and by the afternoon I felt no more significant than an ant. I had never thought to be disdained by a tree.