Top 500 Patrick Rothfuss Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Then, since all my other options seemed to be exhausted, I decided it would be best if I fell off the roof.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

402. “When you read a fantasy novel part of the fun is getting to explore a new world. Everyone knows that. But I believe the same is true about characters. You can explore interesting people in the same way that you explore a town or a culture.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

403. “Sentirse solo era terrible.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

404. “Vashet shook a finger and cuffed the young girl on the side of her head. It was the same scolding any child receives. Stay out of the neighbor’s garden. Don’t tease the Bentons’ sheep. Don’t play tag among the thousand spinning knives of your people’s sacred tree.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

405. “She tried to slide it back to proper true, but couldn’t see the shape of it and couldn’t tell the way of things and if it was a place where it was right.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

406. “Most games follow a real railroad plot, no matter what you want, you’re following their storyline to its unavoidable conclusion. I’d like to write a game where your character can follow any number of possible story arcs and sub-plots.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

407. “Etiquette is a set of rules people use so they can be rude to each other in public.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

408. “If you have never been desperately poor, I doubt you can understand the relief I felt. For months I’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop, knowing that any small catastrophe could ruin me. But now I no longer had to live every day worrying about my next term’s tuition or the interest on Devi’s loan. I was no longer in danger of being forced out of the University.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

409. “A pinned butterfly holds no delight. A pinned butterfly is nothing like a butterfly at all.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

410. “Some of my Arcanum bunkmates taught me a card game called dogs-breath. I returned the favor by giving an impromptu lesson in psychology, probability, and manual dexterity. I won almost two whole talents before they stopped inviting me back to their games.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

411. “Once I knew what was bothering me, the greater part of my uneasiness left. Fear tends to come from ignorance. Once I knew what the problem was, it was just a problem, nothing to fear.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

412. “You can have an interesting story about a person living an interesting life. And if it’s done well, that is just as engaging as the end of the world. A million people dying – we can’t process. One person, we can process.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

413. “I loved college. I wish I was still taking classes instead of teaching them.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

414. “He suggested several unpleasant, unsanitary things I could do to myself at my earliest convenience.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

415. “My fear is, what is the larger effect of my book on the world and on the minds of the people who take the time to consume it? Am I contributing in a positive way to the overall kind of collective consciousness of people in the world? I worry about that.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

416. “He barely even owned his own name, and even that had been worn thin and threadbare through the years.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

417. “After a certain point is reached the numbers cease to matter, and all that remains is the faceless mass of a crowd.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

418. “You’d be surprised at the sorts of things hidden away in children’s songs.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

419. “You need to realize that most writing rules aren’t laws, they’re rules of thumb.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

420. “The night is perfect in a wild way, almost terrifyingly beautiful.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

421. “Do you know what it’s like to run spellcheck for six hours? It’s like a party in purgatory. A party in purgatory where all they have to drink is sugar-free Kool-aid, and the only game to play is Monopoly, and none of your friends show up.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

422. “She listened, then opened up the door and looked again. Nothing. But simply seeing did not help. She knew that seeming wasn’t hardly half of things.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

423. “I imagine I could do anything,” I said easily. “If you would ask it of me.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

424. “It might not be true, but that doesn’t mean it’s nonsense.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

425. “What I personally knew about courting women could comfortably fit into a thimble without taking it off your finger first.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

426. “Cruelty never helped the turning of the world.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

427. “She laughed so sweet and loud and long it sounded like a bell, a harp, a song.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

428. “Soon. She knew. Soon he would come visiting. Incarnadine and sweet and sad and broken. Just like her.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

429. “They had spilled their secrets, and Auri knew full well how heavy hard-held secrets could become.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

430. “It was baffling. These creatures. The were fraught and frayed win their desire. A snake would never poison itself, but these folk made an art of it. They wrapped themselves in fears and wept at being blind. It was infuriating. It was enough to break a heart.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

431. “Bast looked at him incredulously.“The whole world is burning down,“he said.“Open your eyes.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

432. “In closing, she advised me to drink more water, get some sleep, and suggested that in the future I refrain from strenuous physical activity in a hot room the day after falling off a roof.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

433. “I didn’t really have any idea how I would find her. Some foolish, romantic part of me thought I would know her when I saw her. If she were half as radiant as her voice, she would shine like a candle in a dark room. But as I thought these things, the wiser part of me was whispering in my other ear. Do not hope, it said. Do not dare hold hope that any woman could burn as brightly as the voice that sang the part of Aloine.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

434. “The gesture was so tight with rage she feared she’d snap and crack the world in two.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

435. “A troublesome question? Those tend to be the only whorthwhile kind.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

436. “But for half a minute she wished it was a different sort of day, even though she knew that nothing good could come from wanting at the world.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

437. “After a moment he reached out and brushed the unruly red hair back from his face, like a mother would with a sleeping child. Then he began to sing softly, the tune lilting and strange, almost a lullaby:.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

438. “I hate nothing so much as doing a thing badly.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

439. “My fingers darted, then danced, then flew. I played hard as a hailstorm, like a hammer beating brass. I played soft as sun on autumn wheat, gentle as a single stirring leaf.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

440. “Nothing was nothing else. Nothing was anything it shouldn’t be.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

441. “She pulled the cork and sniffed it. “What’s in it?” “Sunlight,” I said. “And a smile, and a question.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

442. “The Chancellor looked down at the empty table for a minute. Then he shrugged, looked up, and gave a surprisingly jaunty smile. “All in favor of admitting first-term Kvothe’s reckless use of sympathy as proof of mastery of basic principles of sympathy vote by show of hands.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

443. “The key needed urgent tending. It was for certain the most restless of the lot. This wasn’t even a slim sliver of surprise. Keys were hardly known for their complacency, and this one was near howling for a lock. Auri picked it up and turned it in her hands. A door key. It wasn’t shy about the fact at all.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

444. “What what. Hush hush.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

445. “It is easier to understand if you think of it in terms of music. Sometimes a man enjoys a symphony. Elsetimes he finds a jig more suited to his taste. The same holds true for lovemaking. One type is suited to the deep cushions of a twilight forest glade. Another comes quite naturally tangled in the sheets of narrow beds upstairs in inns. Each woman is like an instrument, waiting to be learned, loved, and finely played, to have at last her own true music made.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

446. “Being able to think about two disparate things at once, aside from being wonderfully efficient, was roughly akin to being able to sing harmony with yourself.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

447. “When left to its own devices it tends to make me look as if I’ve been set afire.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

448. “You need to decide what you want for yourself. You want to go home? There’s a price. You want control over your life? There’s a price. You want the freedom to say no? There’s a price. There’s always a price.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

449. “No matter where you are, people are basically the same. Besides, anger can keep you warm at night, and wounded pride can spur a man to wondrous things.”

— Patrick Rothfuss

450. “I think the best part of being an author is that I get to learn about anything I want and explain it away as research.”

— Patrick Rothfuss