Patrick Rothfuss Quotes

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“I’d heard you were dead.”
"I heard you wear a red lace corset,” I said matter-of-factly. “But I don’t believe every bit of nonsense that gets rumored about.”

“… it is better to have a mouthful of poison than a secret of the heart.”

“Only a fool worries over what he can’t control.”

“When you love something, you have to make sure it loves you back, or you'll bring about no end of trouble chasing it.”

“It’s hard to be wrongfully accused, but it’s worse when the people looking down on you are clods who have never read a book or traveled more than twenty miles from the place they were born.”

“I needed to let them know they couldn't hurt me. I've learned that the best way to stay safe is to make your enemies think you can't be hurt.”

“It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.”

“He taught only one class: 'Unlikely Maths'. But since the time was listed as "now" and the place, "everywhere," this was hardly helpful in tracking him down.”

“Practice makes the master.”

“Plainly said, he was giving me enough rope to hang myself with. Apparently he didn’t realize that once a noose is tied, it will fit one neck as easily as another.”

“If you are going to impose your will on the world, you must have control over what you believe.”

“I won the only duel I ever lost.”

“She taught me I should never do anything in private I did not want talked about in public, and cautioned me not to talk in my sleep.”

“I only know one story. But oftentimes small pieces seem to be stories themselves.”

“This story is for all the slightly broken people out there. I am one of you. You are not alone. You are all beautiful to me.”

“A poet is a musician who can't sing.”

“You are not wise enough to fear me as I should be feared.”

“Roses! I swear you men have all your romance from the same worn book. Flowers are a good thing, a sweet thing to give a lady. But it is always roses, always red, and always perfect hothouse blooms when they can come by them.”

“Why would I want to win anything other than a beautiful game?”

“That was another lesson I had learned perhaps too well: people meant pain.”

“Some days simply lay on you like stones.”

“Hespe's mouth went firm. She didn't scowl exactly, but it looked like she was getting all the pieces of a scowl together in one place, just in case she needed them in a hurry.”

“What use is? What good is watching for that matter? People are forever watching things. They should be. Ithe things I look at. I am a see-er.”

“It took him a long, miserable time before he realized the truth of things: There is a great deal of difference between a penis and a heart.”

“The desire for knowledge shapes a man.”

“Do not mistake me for my mask. You see light dappling on the water and forget the deep, cold dark beneath.”

“I like your manly bravado," she said. "Do it some more.”

“But sometimes the best help a person can find is helping someone else.”

“Do you just want to get by? Or do you want to make me proud?”

“The second was some rather bad poetry, but it was short, and I forced my way through by gritting my teeth and occasionally closing one eye so as not to damage the entirety of my brain.”

“Ambrose, your presence is the horseshit frosting on the horseshit cake that is the admissions interview process.”

“If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it.”

“But no. There is a difference between the truth and what we wish were true.”

“I cannot help but wonder how many of us walk through our lives, day after day, feeling slightly broken and alone, surrounded all the time by others who feel exactly the same way.”

“I'll string a fiddle with your guts and make you play it while I dance.”

“The seeds of the past bear fruit in the present.”

“I’d heard he had started a fistfight in one of the seedier local taverns because someone had insisted on saying the word “utilize” instead of “use.”

“If I seem to wander, if I seem to stray, remember that true stories seldom take the straightest way”

“I need you to breathe for me.”

“I am no poet. I do not love words for the sake of words. I love words for what they can accomplish. Similarly, I am no arithmetician. Numbers that speak only of numbers are of little interest to me.”

“Each woman is like an instrument, waiting to be learned, loved, and finely played, to have at last her own true music made.”

“All stories are true,” Skarpi said. “But this one really happened, if that’s what you mean.”

“You,” I said, “are sweet music in a distant room.”

“If your name is getting too heavy, you should have Kvothe give you a new one.”

“Someone's parents have been singing entirely the wrong sort of songs.”

“I can't give you the moon,” the tinker said. “She doesn't belong to me. She belongs only to herself.”

“She was a wicked thing sometimes. All full of want. As if the shape of the world depended on her mood. As if she were important.”

“I guess I'm destined to be loveless”

“I learned to love the feel of good words.”