Quotes from Fool's Errand

“Stop longing.You poison today’s ease, reaching always for tomorrow.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“Death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“Death is always less painful and easier than life! You speak true. And yet we do not, day to day, choose death. Because ultimately, death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Death is what you get when there are no choices left to make.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“Silence can ask all the questions, where the tongue is prone to ask only the wrong one.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“The past is no further away than the last breath you took.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“Fitz: Shall we get up tomorrow and go looking for a wild pig?
Nighteyes: I didn’t lose any wild pigs, did you?”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“I believed that by fixing it down in words, I could force sense from all that had happened, that effect would follow cause, and the reason for each event come clear to me.

But then I returned one day, to find all my careful scribing gone to fragments of vellum lying in a trampled yard with wet snow blowing over them. I sat my horse, looking down at them, and knew that, as it always would, the past had broken free of my effort to define and understand it. History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“If a man does not die of a wound, then it heals in some fashion, and so it is with loss. From the sharp pain of immediate berevement, both the Prince and I passed into the gray days of numb bewilderment and waiting. So grief has always seemed to me, a time of waiting not for the hurt to pass, but to become accustomed to it.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“Is time the wheel that turns, or the track it leaves behind?”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“Wait for you? Not likely. I've always had to run ahead of you and show you the way.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“You can be the dead fish. I'll be the old stick”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“There is little in life so reassuring as a genuine welcome.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“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.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“I think that old magic draws much of its strength from that acknowledgment: that we are a part of that world.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“Fitz: How bad is it?
Nighteyes: Mind your own business.
Fitz: You ARE my business.
Nighteyes: Sharing pain doesn’t loosen it.
Fitz: I’m not sure about THAT.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“So, with all the wide world to choose from, you didn't choose at all. You simply stopped wandering one day”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“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.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“You have been with me, as close as the tips of my fingers, even when we were years and seas apart. Your being was like the hum of a plucked string at the edge of my hearing, or a scent carried on a breeze. Did not you feel it so?”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“Some speak of the savagery of beasts. I will ever prefer that to the thoughtless contempt some men have toward animals.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“And a Fool is supposed to be wise?”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“One devoted to his cat would not leave it long alone. A cat’s loyalty is not a thing to be taken for granted, but courted day by day.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“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 that 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 times 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 all will 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.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“The truth, I discovered, is a tree that grows as a man gains access to experience. A child sees the acorn of his daily life, but a man looks back on the oak.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“All cats talk however they want. To whomever they want. But only a rude human speaks out of turn. Be quiet.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“Regrets are useless, " the Fool replied. "All you can do is start from where you are.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“Despite my pain, I felt not the regret of an ending, but the foreboding of a beginning.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“There is nothing dishonorable about abandoning pain. Sometimes peace is most quickly found when a man simply stops avoiding it." He shifted slightly in the dark. "And you never again lay awake all night, staring at darkness and thinking of them.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“When you cut pieces from the truth to avoid sounding like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead.”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

“What does who call me when?”
― Robin Hobb, quote from Fool's Errand

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Popular quotes

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― Rivera Sun, quote from Steam Drills, Treadmills and Shooting Stars - a story of our times -

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― Kristan Higgins, quote from The Best Man

“The goal of faith isn't to take away your fears but to leverage those fears to create bolder belief. Faith leads you past your fears and reassures you of God's presence. And after a while, you begin to trust that God is going to lift you above the weaves this time just like he did last time.”
― Steven Furtick, quote from Sun Stand Still: What Happens When You Dare to Ask God for the Impossible

“During any prolonged activity one tends to forget original intentions. But I believe that, when making a start on A Month in the Country, my idea was to write an easy-going story, a rural idyll along the lines of Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree. And, to establish the right tone of voice to tell such a story, I wanted its narrator to look back regretfully across forty or fifty years but, recalling a time irrecoverably lost, still feel a tug at the heart.

And I wanted it to ring true. So I set its background up in the North Riding, on the Vale of Mowbray, where my folks had lived for many generations and where, in the plow-horse and candle-to-bed age, I grew up in a household like that of the Ellerbeck family.

Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit one's ends. The visit to the dying girl, a first sermon, the Sunday-school treat, a day in a harvest field and much more happened between the Pennine Moors and the Yorkshire Wolds. But the church in the fields is in Northamptonshire, its churchyard in Norfolk, its vicarage London. All's grist that comes to the mill.

Then, again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past.”
― J.L. Carr, quote from A Month in the Country

“Aquel que quiere conseguir poco debe sacrificar poco; aquel que quiere conseguir mucho debe sacrificar mucho; aquel que quiere conseguir el máximo debe sacrificarlo todo. JAMES ALLEN”
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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.