Currently, I have only managed to finish off the first trilogy in the mammoth that Realm of the Elderlings happens to be but I plan to power through the series soon and add the remainder of the quotes so sit back and enjoy what I have to offer. If you feel a few hidden gems are missing, email me!
Hunting for more YA books? Get a taste of badassery with Nevernight Trilogy Quotes
Farseer Trilogy
Assassin’s Apprentice
When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool you end up looking like a moron instead.
Don’t do what you can’t undo, until you’ve considered what you can’t do once you’ve done it.
Very little worth knowing is taught by fear.
Nothing takes the heart out of a man more than the expectation of failure.
When you spring to an idea, and decide it is truth, without evidence, you blind yourself to other possibilities.
Too late to apologize, I’ve already forgiven you.
Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too.
Learning is never wrong. Even learning how to kill isn’t wrong. Or right. It’s just a thing to learn, a thing I can teach you. That’s all.
*My silences he mistook for a lack of wit rather than a lack of any need to speak.
I think myself cured of all spite, but when I touch pen to paper, the hurt of a boy bleeds out with sea-spawned ink, until I suspect each carefully formed black letter scabs over some ancient scarlet wound.
Locked into loneliness were we two and looking at one another every evening we each saw the one we blamed for it.
I have since come to know that many men always see another’s good fortune as a slight to themselves
If you can read, you can learn anything. If you’ve a will to.
For there is a very strange peace in giving over your judgment to someone else, to saying to them, “You lead and I will follow, and I will trust entirely that you will not lead me to death or harm.”
You’re not especially strong, or fast, or bright. Don’t think you are. But you’ll have the stubborness to wear down anyone stronger, or faster, or brighter than yourself.
I’ll be teaching you the nasty, furtive, polite ways to kill people.
When you spring to an idea, and decide it is truth, without evidence, you blind yourself to other possibilities
For it is said, one may ask of the Elderlings, but what they answer may not be the question you ask, but the one you should have asked. And the answer to that question may be one a man cannot hear and live.
what I have become. And so I begin again, and again, but always find that I am writing of my own beginnings rather than the beginnings of this land. I do not even know to whom I try to explain myself. My life has been a web of secrets, secrets that even now are unsafe to share. Shall I set them all down on fine paper, only to create from them flame and ash? Perhaps. My memories reach back to when I was six years old. Before that, there is nothing, only a blank gulf
I know you meant no harm by it, boy. But men don’t talk about times spent among the pillows with a lady. And assassins don’t talk about…our business.”
We all get used to things we once swore we could never live with
If ever you make it so they don’t need you, they will kill you.
I’d have wished myself elsewhere, but there is something in a boy that takes the mundanely difficult and unpleasant and turns it into a personal challenge and an adventure.
I idly wished for something else, for any situation that was neither this forsaken chamber nor the tenseness of Burrich’s room. For a restfulness that perhaps I had once known somewhere else but could no longer recall. And so I drowsed into oblivion.
But take him now, Regal, and shape him, and a decade hence you will command his loyalty. […] A bastard, Regal, is a unique thing. Put a signet ring on his hand and send him forth, and you have created a diplomat no foreign ruler will dare to turn away. He may safely be sent where a prince of the blood may not be risked. Imagine the uses for one who is and yet is not of the royal bloodline. Hostage exchanges. Martial alliances. Quiet work. The diplomacy of the knife.
Royal Assassin
He shook his head pityingly. “This, more than anything else, is what I have never understood about your people. You can roll dice, and understand that the whole game may hinge on one turn of a die. You deal out cards, and say that all a man’s fortune for the night may turn upon one hand. But a man’s whole life, you sniff at, and say, what, this naught of a human, this fisherman, this carpenter, this thief, this cook, why, what can they do in the great wide world? And so you putter and sputter your lives away, like candles burning in a draft.”
“Not all men are destined for greatness,” I reminded him.“Are you sure, Fitz? Are you sure? What good is a life lived as if it made no difference at all to the great life of the world? A sadder thing I cannot imagine. Why should not a mother say to herself, if I raise this child aright, if I love and care for her, she shall live a life that brings joy to those about her, and thus I have changed the world? Why should not the farmer that plants a seed say to his neighbor, this seed I plant today will feed someone, and that is how I change the world today?”
“This is philosophy, Fool. I have never had time to study such things.” “No, Fitz, this is life. And no one has time not to think of such things. Each creature in the world should consider this thing, every moment of the heart’s beating. Otherwise, what is the point of arising each day?
Stop thinking of what you intend to do. Stop thinking of what you have just done. Then, stop thinking that you have stopped thinking of those things. Then you will find the Now, the time that stretches eternal, and is really the only time there is.
Men of passion and vision are often seen as mad.
The fight isn’t over until you win it, Fitz. That’s all you have to remember. No matter what the other man says.
I have heard it called a dance, I have heard it called a battle. Some men speak of it with a knowing laugh, some with a sneer. I have heard the study market women chuckling over it like hens clucking over bread crumbs; I have been approached by bawds who spoke their wares as boldly as peddlers hawking fresh fish. For myself, I think some things are beyond words. The color blue can only be experienced, as can the scent of jasmine or the sound of a flute. The curve of a warm bared shoulder, the uniquely feminine softness of a breast, the startled sound one makes when all barriers suddenly yield, the perfume of her throat, the taste of her skin are all but parts, and sweet as they may be, they do not embody the whole. A thousand such details still would not illustrate it.
The separate parts of my life became like beads and I the string that ran through them all. I believe if I had ever paused to consider the intricacy of all I did to keep those parts separate, I would have found it impossible. But I was young then, much younger than I suspected, and somehow I found the energy and time to do and be it all.
Some things may be learned from words on a page, but some skills are learned first by a man’s hands and heart, and later by his head.
But we are two old men, who have grown old together. Sometimes that is a greater closeness. We have come through time to your day and age. We can talk together, quietly, and share memories of a time that exists no more. I can tell you how it was, but it is not the same. It is like being two foreigners, trapped in a land we have come to, unable to return to our own, and having only each other to confirm the reality of the place we once lived.
My head cleared, and suddenly I had heart to fight again, to ignore pain and damage, to fight! I swear I saw myself, face purpled from strangling, the rich blood streaming and soaking and the smell so maddening.
When I had encountered the Skill joy, I had not found it the tawdry pleasure Galen had implied. Rather, it had been the same rush of blood and thunder of earth that sometimes music brought to me, or a sudden flight of bright pheasant in an autumn wood, or even the pleasure of taking a horse perfectly over a difficult jump. That instant when all things come into balance, and for a moment turn together as perfectly as birds wheeling in flight.
There is a place where all time is now, and the choices are simple and always your own.
Accept the discipline, live up to the task.
I fancied that if I sat very still, I could still feel the warmth of Molly’s arms around me. I knew precisely where her cheek had touched mine. A very faint scent of her clung to my shirt from our brief embrace, and I agonized over whether to wear the shirt that day, to carry that scent with me, or to set it aside carefully in my clothing chest, to preserve it. I did not think it a foolish thing at all to care so much about that. Looking back, I smile, but it is at my wisdom, not my folly.
Does no one around here ever use the healer?
Always I have possessed the loneliness of one raised amid intrigues and clustering secrets, the isolation of a boy who cannot trust the completeness of his heart to anyone.
We cannot put old heads on young shoulders.
Assassin’s Quest
There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise. A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.
Someday is someday, and maybe it will be or maybe it won’t. This is a human thing, to worry about things that may or may not come to be. You can’t eat meat until you’ve killed it.
…To free humanity of time. For time is the great enslaver of us all. Time that ages us, time that limits us. Think how often you have wished to have more time for something, or wished you could go back a day and do something differently. When humanity is freed of time, old wrongs can be corrected before they are done.
No. This is right. I feel it. I am the Catalyst, and I came to change all things. Prophets become warriors, dragons hunt as wolves.
You will live to love again. You know you have lost your springtime girl, your Molly on the beach with the wind in her brown hair and red cloak. You have been gone too long from her, and too much has befallen you both. And what you loved, what both of you truly loved, was not each other. It was the time of your life. It was the spring of your years, and life running strong in you, and war on your doorstep and your strong, perfect bodies. Look back, in truth. You will find you recall fully as many quarrels and tears as you do lovemaking and kisses. Fitz. Be wise. Let her go, and keep those memories intact. Save what you can of her, and let her keep what she can of the wild and daring boy she loved. Because both he and that merry little miss are no more than memories anymore." She shook her head. “No more than memories.
Somewhere inside me, a madman raged in his cell, but I chose not to know of that.
You are not a man as ordinary men are. They think they have a right to all beasts; to hunt them and eat them, or to subjugate them and rule their lives. You know you have no such right to mastery. The horse that carries you will do so because he wishes to, as does the wolf that hunts beside you. You have a deeper sense of yourself in the world. You believe you have a right, not to rule it, but to be part of it. Predator or prey; there is no shame to being either one.
I looked at her, wanting her with all the lust of my months alone and untouched. But I knew also that for that deeper hunger for companionship and understanding, she offered me no more solace than any man might find in his own hand.
Other men might dream of high honors or riches or deeds of valor sung by minstrels. I wanted to come to a small cot as light faded, to sit in a chair by a fire, my back aching from work, my hands rough with toil, and hold a little girl in my lap while a woman who loved me told me of her day.
Perhaps there can be no thanks nor any blame, but only recognition of the forces that brought us and bound us to our inevitable fates.
Some people say there is relief in the sharing of cares and pains. To me there was no catharsis, only an unearthing of rotting corpses of memories, a baring of still suppurating wounds.
All of history, a great wheel, turning inexorably. Just as seasons come and go, just as the moon moves endlessly through her cycle, so does time. The same wars are fought, the same plagues descend, the same folk, good or evil, rise to power. Humanity is trapped on that wheel, doomed endlessly to repeat the mistakes we have we have already made. Unless someone comes to change it.
I take myself with me. That’s all I truly need, or own.
He pleasures his body with drugs and deadens his soul with his savage amusements. Aye, and spreads the disease to those around him, until they take no satisfaction in a contest of skill that draws no blood, until games are only amusing if lives are wagered on the outcome.
In every building, in every garden, at every turn the visitor finds the austere beauty and simplicity of color and form that are the Mountain ideal. The overall impression that one carries away is of tranquillity and joy in the natural world. The chosen simplicity of life there may lead the visitor to question his own choice in life.
Take my memories of my mother, and the feelings that went with them. I do not want to know them at all. Take the ache in my throat when I think of Molly, take all the sharp-edged, bright-colored days I recall with her. Take their brilliance and leave me but the shadows of what I saw and felt. Let me recall them without cutting myself on their sharpness. Take my days and nights in Regal’s dungeons. It is enough to know what was done to me. Take it to keep, and let me stop feeling my face against that stone floor, hearing the sound of my nose breaking, smelling and tasting my own blood. Take my hurt that I never knew my father, take my hours of staring up at his portrait when the great hall was empty and I could do so alone. Take my— Fitz. Stop. You give her too much, there will be nothing left of you.
I know of nothing more warming than hot meat and tea and good fellowship.
I supposed there was something about me that made all elderly folk assume my time was at their disposal.
Death is always at the edge of now.