Robin Hobb Quote
And not only the world but humanity itself does need dragons And why is that? Chade demanded disdainfully. To keep the balance, the Fool replied. He glanced over me, and then past me, out of the window and his eyes went far and pensive. Humanity fears no rivals. You have forgotten what it was to share the world with creatures as arrogantly superior as yourselves. You think to arrange the world to your liking. So you map the land and draw lines across it, claiming ownership simply because you can draw a picture of it. The plants that grow and the beasts that rove, you mark as your own, claiming not only what lives today, but what might grow tomorrow, to do with as you please. Then, in your conceit and aggression, you wage wars and slay one another over the lines you have imagined on the world’s face. And I suppose dragons are better than we are because they don’t do such things, because they simply take whatever they see. Free spirits, nature’s creatures, possessing all the moral loftiness that comes from not being able to think. The Fool shook his head, smiling. No. Dragons are no better than humans. They are little different at all from men. They will hold up a mirror to humanity’s selfishness. They will remind you that all your talk of owning this and claiming that is no more than the snarling of a chained dog or a sparrow’s challenge song. The reality of those claims lasts but for the instant of its sounding. Name it as you will, claim it as you will, the world does not belong to men. Men belong to the world. You will not own the earth that eventually your body will become, nor will it recall the name it once answered to.
And not only the world but humanity itself does need dragons And why is that? Chade demanded disdainfully. To keep the balance, the Fool replied. He glanced over me, and then past me, out of the window and his eyes went far and pensive. Humanity fears no rivals. You have forgotten what it was to share the world with creatures as arrogantly superior as yourselves. You think to arrange the world to your liking. So you map the land and draw lines across it, claiming ownership simply because you can draw a picture of it. The plants that grow and the beasts that rove, you mark as your own, claiming not only what lives today, but what might grow tomorrow, to do with as you please. Then, in your conceit and aggression, you wage wars and slay one another over the lines you have imagined on the world’s face. And I suppose dragons are better than we are because they don’t do such things, because they simply take whatever they see. Free spirits, nature’s creatures, possessing all the moral loftiness that comes from not being able to think. The Fool shook his head, smiling. No. Dragons are no better than humans. They are little different at all from men. They will hold up a mirror to humanity’s selfishness. They will remind you that all your talk of owning this and claiming that is no more than the snarling of a chained dog or a sparrow’s challenge song. The reality of those claims lasts but for the instant of its sounding. Name it as you will, claim it as you will, the world does not belong to men. Men belong to the world. You will not own the earth that eventually your body will become, nor will it recall the name it once answered to.
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About Robin Hobb
Hobb achieved commercial success with her debut work under this pseudonym, the Farseer trilogy. An epic fantasy told as a first-person retrospective, it has been described as a character-driven and introspective work. Hobb went on to write four further series set in the Realm of the Elderlings, which received praise from critics for her characterization, and in 2005 The Times described her as "one of the great modern fantasy writers". Through her writing, Hobb explores otherness, ecocentrism, queerness, and gender as themes. She concluded the Elderlings series in 2017 and won the World Fantasy Award—Life Achievement in 2021.