Fool's Errand

Stop longing.You poison today’s ease, reaching always for tomorrow.

Death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice.

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.

Silence can ask all the questions, where the tongue is prone to ask only the wrong one.

The past is no further away than the last breath you took.

Fitz: Shall we get up tomorrow and go looking for a wild pig? Nighteyes: I didn’t lose any wild pigs, did you?

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.

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.

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

Wait for you? Not likely. I've always had to run ahead of you and show you the way.

You can be the dead fish. I'll be the old stick

There is little in life so reassuring as a genuine welcome.

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.

I think that old magic draws much of its strength from that acknowledgment: that we are a part of that world.

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.

So, with all the wide world to choose from, you didn't choose at all. You simply stopped wandering one day

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.

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?

Some speak of the savagery of beasts. I will ever prefer that to the thoughtless contempt some men have toward animals.

And a Fool is supposed to be wise?

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.

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.

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.

All cats talk however they want. To whomever they want. But only a rude human speaks out of turn. Be quiet.

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.

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.

When you cut pieces from the truth to avoid sounding like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead.

What does who call me when?