Fantasy is my genre and my home in the writing world. I consider it the biggest writing room in all literature, where there are literally no boundaries at all.
Robin HobbRead
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.
Interpretation
Grief is a process of adjusting to loss rather than simply waiting for the pain to go away.
In this quote, Robin Hobb reflects on the nature of grief, comparing it to a wound that, while it may heal, still requires time and patience to truly come to terms with. She emphasizes that losing someone leads not only to immediate pain but also to a prolonged period of numbness where one must learn to live with that loss, indicating that the journey of grief involves not just enduring the hurt, but also adapting to a new reality without the loved one.
In practice
In a memorial speech to honor someone who has passed away.
Fantasy is my genre and my home in the writing world. I consider it the biggest writing room in all literature, where there are literally no boundaries at all.
As I apologized to her a flicker of panic raced through me and then faded away. There wasn't enough life left in me to panic. I'd made a mistake and I was dying. Apparently not even a Speck afterlife was available to me. I'd simply stop being. Apparently I hadn't died correctly. Oops.
That is the challenge Companion. To take what has happened to you and learn from it. Nothing is quite so destructive as pity, especially self-pity. No event in life is so terrible that one cannot rise above it.
Start writing sooner. Don't wait for permission. Don't hesitate.
I healed. Not completely. A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding.
I wonder if I can write this history, or if on every page there will be some sneaking show of a bitterness I thought long dead. I think myself cured of all spite, but when I touch pen to paper, the hurt of a boy bleeds out with the sea-spawned ink, until I suspect each carefully formed black letter scabs over some ancient scarlet wound.
I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.
I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
If you cannot be at ease with yourself when alone, you will seek a relationship to cover up your unease. You can be sure that the unease will then reappear in some other form within the relationship, and you will probably hold your partner responsible for it.
Everywhere, we learn only from those whom we love.
If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.
Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.
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