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

“You listen to your heart, Jack. And you listen to the voice that comes to you when you close your eyes. You'll know it because it will be something between a feeling and a whisper. And that voice? Jack, if your heart is good like yours is, that voice never, ever lies.”
― Mia Sheridan, quote from Finding Eden

“Across the river he could see the burnt and crushed buildings of Fredericksburg, the debris piled along the streets, the scattered ruins of people's lives, lives that were changed forever. His men had done that. Not all of it, of course. The whole corps had seemed to go insane, had turned the town into some kind of violent party, a furious storm that blew out of control, and he could not stop it. The commanders had ordered the provost guards at the bridges to let no goods leave the town, nothing could be carried across the bridges, and so what the men could not keep, what they could not steal, they had just destroyed. And now, he thought, the people will return, trying to rescue some fragile piece of home, and they will find this...and they will learn something new about war, more than the quiet nightmare of leaving your home behind. They will learn that something happens to men, men who have felt no satisfaction, who have absorbed and digested defeat after bloody stupid defeat, men who up to now have done mostly what they were told to do. And when those men begin to understand that it is not anything in them, no great weakness or inferiority, but that it is the leaders, the generals and politicians who tell them what to do, that the fault is there, after a while they will stop listening. Then the beast, the collective anger, battered and bloodied, will strike out, will respond to the unending sights of horror, the deaths of friends and brothers, and it will not be fair or reasonable or just, since there is no intelligence in the beast. They will strike out at whatever presents itself, and here it was the harmless and innocent lives of the people of Fredericksburg.”
― Jeff Shaara, quote from Gods and Generals

“Questions are not scary. What is scary is when people don’t have any. What is tragic is faith that has no room for them.”
― Rob Bell, quote from Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith

“At this time in his life Zinkoff sees no difference between the stars in the sky and the stars in his mother's plastic Baggie. He believes that stars fall from the sky sometimes, and that his mother goes around collecting them like acorns. He believes she has to use heavy gloves and dark sunglasses because the fallen stars are so hot and shiny. She puts them in the freezer for forty-five minutes, and when they come out they are flat and silver and sticky on the back and ready for his shirts.”
― Jerry Spinelli, quote from Loser

“How well he’s read, to reason against reading!”
― Clive James, quote from Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

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About BookQuoters

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.