Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The fight isn’t over until you win.”

— Robin Hobb

2. “Look forward, not back. Correct your course and go on. You cannot undo yesterday’s journey.”

— Robin Hobb

3. “Wolves have no kings.”

— Robin Hobb

4. “Don’t do what you can’t undo, until you’ve considered what you can’t do once you’ve done it.”

— Robin Hobb

5. “Leave the pain behind and let your life be your own again. There is a place where all time is now, and the choices are simple and always your own. Wolves have no kings.”

— Robin Hobb

6. “Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there any more.”

— Robin Hobb

7. “Death is always less painful and easier than life! You speak true. And yet we do not, day to day, choose death. Because ultimately, death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Death is what you get when there are no choices left to make.”

— Robin Hobb

8. “Perhaps having the courage to find a better path is having the courage to risk making new mistakes.”

— Robin Hobb

9. “If you don’t decide what you will do with the rest of your life, someone else will decide it for you.”

— Robin Hobb

10. “Stop thinking of what you intend to do. Stop thinking of what you have just done. Then, stop thinking that you have stopped thinking of those things. Then you will find the Now, the time that stretches eternal, and is really the only time there is.”

— Robin Hobb

11. “Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too.”

— Robin Hobb

12. “The fight isn’t over until you win it, Fitz. That’s all you have to remember. No matter what the other man says.”

— Robin Hobb

13. “Tomorrow owes you the sum of your yesterdays. No more than that. And no less.”

— Robin Hobb

14. “When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool you end up looking like a moron instead.”

— Robin Hobb

15. “When you spring to an idea, and decide it is truth, without evidence, you blind yourself to other possibilities.”

— Robin Hobb

16. “To be part of a family, or any community, is to have duties and responsibility, to be bound by the rules of that group.”

— Robin Hobb

17. “I never confuse the cost of something with its value.”

— Robin Hobb

18. “It’s all connected. When you save any part of the world, you’ve saved the whole world. In fact, that’s the only way it can be done.”

— Robin Hobb

19. “Anticipating pain was like enduring it twice. Why not anticipate pleasure instead?”

— Robin Hobb

20. “Men of passion and vision are often seen as mad.”

— Robin Hobb

21. “Very little worth knowing is taught by fear.”

— Robin Hobb

22. “Silence can ask all the questions, where the tongue is prone to ask only the wrong one.”

— Robin Hobb

23. “The man who must brag for himself knows that no one else will.”

— Robin Hobb

24. “Fitz: How bad is it? Nighteyes: Mind your own business. Fitz: You ARE my business. Nighteyes: Sharing pain doesn’t loosen it. Fitz: I’m not sure about THAT.”

— Robin Hobb

25. “You seek a false comfort when you demand that I define myself for you with words. Words do not contain or define any person. A heart can, if it is willing.”

— Robin Hobb

26. “Diplomacy is the velvet glove that cloaks the fist of power.”

— Robin Hobb

27. “Death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice.”

— Robin Hobb

28. “Men cannot grieve as dogs do. But they grieve for many years.”

— Robin Hobb

29. “I healed. Not completely. A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding.”

— Robin Hobb

30. “One can only walk so far from one’s true self before the bond either snaps, or pulls one back.”

— Robin Hobb

31. “But a living is not a life.”

— Robin Hobb

32. “I feared my own kind more than anything the natural world could ever threaten me with.”

— Robin Hobb

33. “Someday is someday, and maybe it will be or maybe it won’t. This is a human thing, to worry about things that may or may not come to be. You can’t eat meat until you’ve killed it.”

— Robin Hobb

34. “One man armed with the right word may do what an army of swordsmen cannot.”

— Robin Hobb

35. “A woman of many talents. And intelligent, too. He’d probably have to kill her soon.”

— Robin Hobb

36. “Fitz: Shall we get up tomorrow and go looking for a wild pig? Nighteyes: I didn’t lose any wild pigs, did you?”

— Robin Hobb

37. “Love isn’t just about feeling sure of the other person, knowing what he would give up for you. It’s knowing with certainty what you are willing to surrender for his sake. Make no mistake; each partner gives up something. Individual dreams are surrendered for a shared one.”

— Robin Hobb

38. “A secret is only yours so long as you don’t share it. Tell it to one person, and it’s a secret no more.”

— Robin Hobb

39. “A message is not delivered until it is understood.”

— Robin Hobb

40. “I am the King’s Fool. He is the King-In-Wating. Let him wait.”

— Robin Hobb

41. “How do you politely explain to someone that you had believed for years he was a moron as well as a Fool? Fitz in Assassin’s Apprentice.”

— Robin Hobb

42. “Nothing takes the heart out of a man more than the expectation of failure.”

— Robin Hobb

43. “I think that old magic draws much of its strength from that acknowledgment: that we are a part of that world.”

— Robin Hobb

44. “Ah, Beloved. Of all the things I must bid farewell to, you are the most difficult to lose. Forgive me that I have avoided you. Better, perhaps, that we make a space between us and become accustomed to it before fate forces that upon us.”

— Robin Hobb

45. “Do you do this because you live such short lives? Tell yourselves wild tales of what might happen tomorrow, and feel all the feelings of events that will never happen? Perhaps to make up for the pasts you cannot recall, you invent futures that will not exist.”

— Robin Hobb

46. “When you fear to fail, you fear something that has not happened yet. You predict your own failure, and by inaction, lock yourself into it.”

— Robin Hobb

47. “Life is not a race to restore a past situation. Nor does one have to hurry to meet the future. Seeing how things change is what makes life interesting.”

— Robin Hobb

48. “Sharpening your knife is never a waste of time.”

— Robin Hobb

49. “For the weakest has but to try his strength to find it, and then he shall be strong.”

— Robin Hobb

50. “Today! Today! Tomorrow begins today!”

— Robin Hobb