Robin Hobb

We were both smiling, in that bittersweet way one does when imagining something the heart longs for and the head would dread.

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

Isn't it strange how wise counsel can cool the hottest head? He made sense but my heart screamed protest.

Do you not see how strange and wonderful that is? That all history balances on an affair of the human heart?

Love isn't just about feeling sure of the other person, knowing what he would give up for you. It's knowing with certainty what you are willing to surrender for his sake. Make no mistake; each partner gives up something. Individual dreams are surrendered for a shared one. In some marriages, one partner gives up almost everything she once thought she wanted. But it's not always the woman who does so. Such sacrifice is not shameful. It's love. If you think the man is worth it, it works.

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.

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

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.

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.

Life is a balance. We tend to forget that as we go blithely from day to day. We eat and drink and sleep and assume we will always rise up the next day, that meals and rest will always replenish us. Injuries we expect to heal, and pain to lessen as time goes by. Even when we are faced with wounds that heal more slowly, with pain that lessens by day only to return in full force at nightfall, even when sleep does not leave us rested, we still expect that somehow tomorrow will all come back into balance and that we will go on. At some point, the exquisite balance has tipped, and despite all our flailing efforts, we begin the slow fall from the body that maintains itself to the body that struggles, nails clawing, to cling to what it used to be.

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?

And the world re-ordered itself around me. I spoke each word carefully. 'You are so stupid.

Leave off sniffing the carcass of your old life-do you enjoy unending pain? There is no shame in walking away from bones. Nor is there any special wisdom in injuring oneself over and over. What is your loyalty to that pain? To abandon it will not lessen you.

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

There is nothing dishonorable about abandoning pain. Sometimes peace is most quickly found when a man simply stops avoiding it.

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.

He thought perhaps it was a woman's way, to come out of such a storm of emotion and pain as if she were a ship emerging onto calm seas. She had seemed, not at peace, but emptied of sorrow. As if she had run out of that particular emotion and no other one arose to take its place.