Robin Hobb

I feared my own kind more than anything the natural world could ever threaten me with.

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.

As I apologized to her a flicker of panic raced through me and then faded away. There wasn't enough life left in me to panic. I'd made a mistake and I was dying. Apparently not even a Speck afterlife was available to me. I'd simply stop being. Apparently I hadn't died correctly. Oops.

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.

Why not break free now, and make Bingtown a place where folk begin anew, all men standing on an equal footing?""And all women, too."She must be Sparse's daughter, thought Keffria. Even her voice echoed his in tone. Devouchet looked at her in surprise."It was but a manner of speaking, Ekke," he said mildly."A manner of speaking becomes a manner of thinking.

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.

When the mainstay of one's world is taken away, it's only natural to cling to all the rest, to try desperately to keep things as close to the way they were as one can." He shook his head sorrowfully. "But no one can ever go back to yesterday.

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.

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.

His face was so ravaged, it was like looking at death itself. Except for the smooth, silvered part of it. By creeping degrees, his human hand lifted. He turned it over, showing a bloody palm. His cracked lips moved. Beloved.He could not say the word, but I knew it. So did his Fool.

As if he hadn't always known he was loved the best. That he was the Beloved.

His face was so ravaged, it was like looking at death itself. Except for the smooth, silvered part of it. By creeping degrees, his human hand lifted. He turned it over, showing a bloody palm. His cracked lips moved. 'Beloved.'He could not say the word, but I knew it. So did his Fool.

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.

I could not make it right, but I could make someone pay for how wrong it had been.

Despite my pain, I felt not the regret of an ending, but the foreboding of a beginning.

Regrets are useless, " the Fool replied. "All you can do is start from where you are.

I was dying. And I had never been enough for anything.

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.