Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Boredom is vastly underrated. Boredom means that nothing is trying to kill you every day.”

— Robin Hobb

52. “Cats talk to whomever they please.”

— Robin Hobb

53. “Do you not see how strange and wonderful that is? That all history balances on an affair of the human heart?”

— Robin Hobb

54. “We are as we are. How can you claim to know what life I was meant to lead, let alone threaten to force me into it? All your quibbling is nonsense. As well forbid your nose to snuff, or your ears to hear. We are as we do.”

— Robin Hobb

55. “Locked into loneliness were we two and looking at one another every evening we each saw the one we blamed for it.”

— Robin Hobb

56. “Every small, unselfish action nudges the world into a better path. An accumulation of small acts can change the world.”

— Robin Hobb

57. “I told you I set no limits on my love for you. I don’t. Yet I have never expected you to offer me your body. It was the whole of your heart, all for myself, that I sought. Even though I’ve never had a right to it. For you gave it away ere ever you saw me.”

— Robin Hobb

58. “All of history, a great wheel, turning inexorably. Just as seasons come and go, just as the moon moves endlessly through her cycle, so does time. The same wars are fought, the same plagues descend, the same folk, good or evil, rise to power. Humanity is trapped on that wheel, doomed endlessly to repeat the mistakes we have we have already made. Unless someone comes to change it.”

— Robin Hobb

59. “One must plan for the future and anticipate the future without fearing the future.”

— Robin Hobb

60. “History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.”

— Robin Hobb

61. “Her stillness was such a contrast to all the jumbled communication inside me that I suddenly felt what a tiresome fellow I was, always filling the air with the rattle of words and anxieties.”

— Robin Hobb

62. “There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise. A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.”

— Robin Hobb

63. “There is a place where all time is now, and the choices are simple and always your own. Wolves have no Kings.”

— Robin Hobb

64. “Some people say ‘I want to be a writer,’ and some people say, ‘I want to write.’”

— Robin Hobb

65. “That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in such a way that there is no need for its intervention.”

— Robin Hobb

66. “No man is so dangerous as the man who cannot decide what he fears.”

— Robin Hobb

67. “Your future. It awaits only you, to live it and to write it. – Shaman’s Crossing by Robin Hobb.”

— Robin Hobb

68. “Start writing sooner. Don’t wait for permission. Don’t hesitate.”

— Robin Hobb

69. “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.”

— Robin Hobb

70. “Sometimes it seemed to me a cruelty that so much was unresolved between us; at other times, a blessing that a hope of reunion lingered.”

— Robin Hobb

71. “My blood will only buy you that fool’s regard. I will pay a high price for you to be respected by a churl. Nothing bought with blood is worth having, young man.”

— Robin Hobb

72. “King Shrewd is expecting me, rather he isn’t expecting me, and that is precisely why I must go to him now.”

— Robin Hobb

73. “Not being able to think of a reply is not the same thing as accepting another’s words.”

— Robin Hobb

74. “One had a knife. But I had a staff and was trained to use it.”

— Robin Hobb

75. “What good is a life lived as if it made no difference at all to the great life of the world? – Fool.”

— Robin Hobb

76. “For, “Yes,” he had sighed on his dying breath, and all knew that was the ultimate prayer one could offer to life.”

— Robin Hobb

77. “There is little in life so reassuring as a genuine welcome.”

— Robin Hobb

78. “Too late to apologize, I’ve already forgiven you.”

— Robin Hobb

79. “Don’t listen to people who tell you that very few people get published and you won’t be one of them. Don’t listen to your friend who says you are better that Tolkien and don’t have to try any more. Keep writing, keep faith in the idea that you have unique stories to tell, and tell them.”

— Robin Hobb

80. “A wise old man taught me that diplomacy is the velvet glove that cloaks the fist of power. Persuasion, not force, works best and lasts longest.”

— Robin Hobb

81. “It is worse than useless to do things halfway Bee, for then you think the work is done, but someone must come behind you later to do it all over again. Even if you must work much harder and get less done, it is better to do the whole task the first time.”

— Robin Hobb

82. “I have never been wise.”

— Robin Hobb

83. “You are confusing plumbing and love again.”

— Robin Hobb

84. “FitzChivalry Farseer, too long have you sojourned among the Elderlings, your memory spurned by the very people you saved. Too long have you been in a place where the months pass as if days. Too long have you walked among us in false guise, deprived of your name and your honor. Rise. Turn and face the folk of the Six Duchies, your folk, and be welcomed home at last.”

— Robin Hobb

85. “No. This is right. I feel it. I am the Catalyst, and I came to change all things. Prophets become warriors, dragons hunt as wolves. Fitz in Assassin’s Quest.”

— Robin Hobb

86. “A manner of speaking becomes a manner of thinking.”

— Robin Hobb

87. “Stop your whining. If you are frightened, be silent. Whining is for prey. It attracts predators. And you are not prey.”

— Robin Hobb

88. “Tomorrow owes you the sum of your yesterdays. No more than that.” Amber looked out to sea again. “And no less. Sometimes folk wish tomorrow did not pay them off so completely.”

— Robin Hobb

89. “The knowledge that he had left me with no intent ever to return had come over me in tiny droplets of realization spread over the years. And each droplet of comprehension brought its own small measure of hurt.”

— Robin Hobb

90. “Forgiving the Day. Even the youngest child could do this; all it required was looking back over the day and dismissing the day’s pains as a thing that were past while choosing to remember as gains lessons learned or moments of insight.”

— Robin Hobb

91. “Honour and courtesy and justice... they are not real, Fitz. We all pretend to them, and hold them to us like shields. But they guard only against folk who carry the same shields. Against those who have discarded them, they are no shields at all, but only additional weapons to use against their victims.”

— Robin Hobb

92. “Only my pain is more silent than my anger.”

— Robin Hobb

93. “You can be the dead fish. I’ll be the old stick.”

— Robin Hobb

94. “The exercise for centering oneself is a simple one. 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. Then, in that place, you will finally have time to be yourself.”

— Robin Hobb

95. “This is philosophy, Fool. I have never had time to study such things.’ ‘No, Fitz, this is life. And no one has time not to think of such things. Each creature in the world should consider this thing, every moment of the heart’s beating. Otherwise, what is the point of arising each day?”

— Robin Hobb

96. “Everybody has felt at one time or another that everyone else in the world had a better shot than they did, so when you engage that, you engage the reader, and I think you create a character that brings the reader more fully into the story.”

— Robin Hobb

97. “To finally confront the worst there is, to look it squarely in the face and say, “I know you. You have hurt me, almost to death, but still I live. And I will go on living.”

— Robin Hobb

98. “There are endings. There are beginnings. Sometimes they coincide, with the ending of one thing marking the beginning of another. But sometimes there is simply a long space after an ending, a time when it seems everything else has ended and nothing else can ever begin.”

— Robin Hobb

99. “If you can read, you can learn anything. If you’ve a will to.”

— Robin Hobb

100. “Perhaps there can be no thanks nor any blame, but only recognition of the forces that brought us and bound us to our inevitable fates.”

— Robin Hobb