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Quote by Robin Hobb

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City of Dragons

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Author

Robin Hobb
Robin Hobb

Robin Hobb is an American novelist renowned for her fantasy novels. Her works are known for their complex characters and in-depth historical backgrounds, which have won her a dedicated following. more

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“At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night... I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a "white man" disillusioned. All my life I'd had white ambitions; that was why I'd abandoned a good woman like Terry in the San Joaquin Valley I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes.”

“There are many ways to take a heart. And the King of Crows uses all methods; he shies from none. He’s happy to have it cut out all at once as I, the huntsman, did. He’s happy to have it taken piece by piece, year by year, like a miser hoarding coins, with punishing silences, biting glances, and love served cold. Poisonous words do the job, too. They are as sharp as knives and leave their victims hollow.”

“I noticed that as I drove through the defaced and suffering patches of country which still persist between Glasgow and Hamilton and Airdrie and Motherwell, no scents from hedges and fields streamed into the open car. ...it was as if in this region nature no longer breathed, or gave out at most the chill dank mineral breath of coal and iron. The air itself had a synthetic taste, the taste of a food substitute, and seemed to be merely an up-to-date by-product of local industry. The forlorn villages looked like dismembered bits of towns brutally hacked off, and with the raw edges left nakedly exposed. The towns themselves, on the other hand, were like villages on a nightmare scale, which after endless building had never managed to produce what looked like a street, and had no centre of any kind. One could not say that these places were flying asunder, for there was no sign of anything holding them together. They were merely a great number of houses jumbled together in a wilderness of grime, coal-dust and brick, under a blackish-grey synthetic sky.”

“The problem seemed especially important to the Scot in 1938. Never before had he so needed to summon up his strength of character and remember his traditions. No country was more badly hit by the economic changes between the wars... The shipping of men was our speciality, and for the first time probably in Scotland's history the younger generation had of necessity to look at its own country and see what could be done about it... A first duty was the articulation of Scottish problems to the Scot and the firing of his mind and heart to the need of his generation... to interpret, and where possible, dramatize the growing points in Scottish life... using the cinema to maintain the national will.”