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Robin Hobb

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“Was mich betraf, ich war noch Tage krank vor Trauer und fieberte. Ich nehme an, Burrich erzählte, ich hätte irgendeine Kinderkrankheit und so ließ man mich in Frieden. Als ich wieder nach draußen durfte, war es vorbei mit meiner unbeschwerten Freiheit. Burrich beaufsichtigte mich und achtete darauf, dass ich nicht wieder Freundschaft mit einem Tier schloss. Bis zu einem bestimmten Grad hatte er Erfolg, denn es entstand keine besonders enge Verbindung zu einem bestimmten Hund oder Pferd. Ich weiß, er meinte es gut, trotzdem fühlte ich mich von ihm nicht beschützt, sondern eingeengt. Er war der Wärter, der mit fanatischem Eifer meine Isolation überwachte. Damals wurde das Samenkorn der Einsamkeit in meine Seele gepflanzt, schlug Wurzeln, und gedieh zu einem unausrottbaren Teil meines Lebens.”

“He had wished me well in finding my own fate to follow, and I never doubted his sincerity. But it had taken me years to accept that his absence in my life was a deliberate finality, an act he had chosen, a thing completed even as some part of my soul still dangled, waiting for his return. That, I think, is the shock of any relationship ending. It is realizing that what is still an ongoing relationship to someone is, for the other person, something finished and done with.”

“Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever.”

“You have no idea what that would do to my life,” I pleaded quietly. “No. I don't,” he admitted easily, but with growing outrage. “And neither do you. You go around making these monumental decisions about what other people should know or not know about their own lives. But you don't really have any more idea how it will turn out than I do! You just do what you think is safest and then crawl around hoping no one will find out and blame you later if things go wrong!”

“All my life, I'd been accustomed to thinking of life as things that moved: rabbits, dogs, fish, other people. Life that mattered had been life like me, life that breathed and bled, life that ate and slept. I'd been aware of that other layer of life, of the still but living things that supported it all, but I'd thought of it as the lower layer, as the less important stratum of life. Empty prairie was for plowing or grazing; land that was too poor for farming or cattle was wasteland. I'd never lived near a forest like this, but when I'd come to one, I'd understood why it existed. The trees were to be taken for lumber. The land had to be cleared to become useful. The idea that forest or prairie or even wasteland should be left as it was had never occurred to me. What good was land until it was tamed? What good was a piece of earth that did not grow wheat or fruit or grass for cattle? The value of every bit of land I'd ever trodden, I'd reckoned in terms of how it could benefit a man. Now I saw it with the eyes of a forest mage. Here life balanced as it had for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Sunlight and water were all that was required for the trees to grow. The trees made the food that fed not only whatever moving creatures might venture through this territory, but also became the food that replenished the soil when their leaves fell to rot back into earth. This working system was as refined and precise as any piece of clockwork ever engineered by man. It worked perfectly.”

“The second thing you have to do to be a writer is to keep on writing. Don't listen to people who tell you that very few people get published and you won't be one of them. Don't listen to your friend who says you are better that Tolkien and don't have to try any more. Keep writing, keep faith in the idea that you have unique stories to tell, and tell them. I meet far too many people who are going to be writers 'someday.' When they are out of high school, when they've finished college, after the wedding, when the kids are older, after I retire . . . That is such a trap You will never have any more free time than you do right now. So, whether you are 12 or 70, you should sit down today and start being a writer if that is what you want to do. You might have to write on a notebook while your kids are playing on the swings or write in your car on your coffee break. That's okay. I think we've all 'been there, done that.' It all starts with the writing.”

“The knowledge that he had left me with no intent ever to return had come over me in tiny droplets of realization spread over the years. And each droplet of comprehension brought its own small measure of hurt...He had wished me well in finding my own fate to follow, and I never doubted his sincerity. But it had taken me years to accept that his absence in my life was a deliberate finality, an act he had chosen, a thing completed even as some part of my soul still dangled, waiting for his return.”