Robin Hobb

When you spring to an idea, and decide it is truth, without evidence, you blind yourself to other possibilities.

— Robin Hobb

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.

— Robin Hobb

The second thing you have to do to be a writer is to keep on writing. Don't listen to people who tell you that very few people get published and you won't be one of them. Don't listen to your friend who says you are better that Tolkien and don't have to try any more. Keep writing, keep faith in the idea that you have unique stories to tell, and tell them. I meet far too many people who are going to be writers 'someday.' When they are out of high school, when they've finished college, after the wedding, when the kids are older, after I retire . . . That is such a trap You will never have any more free time than you do right now. So, whether you are 12 or 70, you should sit down today and start being a writer if that is what you want to do. You might have to write on a notebook while your kids are playing on the swings or write in your car on your coffee break. That's okay. I think we've all 'been there, done that.' It all starts with the writing.

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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.

— Robin Hobb

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.

— Robin Hobb

When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool you end up looking like a moron instead.

— Robin Hobb

Is time the wheel that turns, or the track it leaves behind?

— Robin Hobb

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.

— Robin Hobb

Leave old pains alone. When they cease coming to call, do not invite them back.

— Robin Hobb

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.

— Robin Hobb

...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

— Robin Hobb

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.

— Robin Hobb

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.

— Robin Hobb