Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “We are here, Fitz, you and I, to change the future of the world. To reach out and hold in place the tiny pebble that could trigger the boulder’s tumbling.”

— Robin Hobb

102. “What a man can take with a sword, a woman can give by her flesh alone. Life.”

— Robin Hobb

103. “Goodbye, FitzChivalry Farseer.”

— Robin Hobb

104. “I began reading everyhing in the family library. Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe. And of course, if you’re running out of books to read you can always read Shakespeare.”

— Robin Hobb

105. “The truth, I discovered, is a tree that grows as a man gains access to experience. A child sees the acorn of his daily life, but a man looks back on the oak.”

— Robin Hobb

106. “I was amazed at how strong women were when they were angry.”

— Robin Hobb

107. “History is what we do in our lives. We create it as we go along.’ He smiled enigmatically. ‘The future is another kind of history.”

— Robin Hobb

108. “Once a man has been broken by pain, he remains forever a victim. He cannot ever forget that place he has visited, the moment when he decided that he would surrender everything rather than endure more pain.”

— Robin Hobb

109. “It is my way, to speak directly. I do not mean to give offense by it. It has always seemed to me that honest words leave the least room for misunderstanding.”

— Robin Hobb

110. “There are moments that change the course of one’s lifetime, and often we don’t realize how significant those initial may be until years pass.”

— Robin Hobb

111. “I do not know whom I wish to win; until I do, I will let no player be eliminated.”

— Robin Hobb

112. “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.”

— Robin Hobb

113. “It was hard to reconcile the drumbeats and lifted voices in the night with my memories of flames and the screams of dying men. How could humanity range so effortlessly from the sublime to the savage and back again?”

— Robin Hobb

114. “When both my editors say ‘This is really bad, you need to change this,’ I ignore that at my peril.”

— Robin Hobb

115. “Drink up your false courage and move forward. It’s the only direction a man can move in.”

— Robin Hobb

116. “Not every problem in the world belongs to you.”

— Robin Hobb

117. “A man has to have a purpose in life. I know this now, but it took me the first score years of my life to learn it. In that I scarcely think myself unique.”

— Robin Hobb

118. “Seldom can one hate a person if one understand that person.”

— Robin Hobb

119. “I was dressed up as a witch for Halloween, and wanted to write a story about my black cat before I went out trick-or-treating. I think it went out with the trash the next day.”

— Robin Hobb

120. “Somehow,” she said coldly, “you have confused profitable and not profitable for right and wrong. I, however, have not.”

— Robin Hobb

121. “The biggest doubts come in the five minutes after I hit send.”

— Robin Hobb

122. “That is true. I could not prevent what was done to me, nor can I change what people made of me. But I know what I am and have decided to continue being what I am.”

— Robin Hobb

123. “I began attempting to write for children under the mistaken assumption that writing for children was easy.”

— Robin Hobb

124. “Very little about being a writer is signing an autograph. It’s sitting in a room and writing. Getting it out.”

— Robin Hobb

125. “The art of diplomacy is the luck of knowing more of your rival’s secrets than he knows of yours. Always deal from a position of power. These were Shrewd’s maxims. And Verity abided by them.”

— Robin Hobb

126. “If a man hits you once, he’ll hit you again, they say. And the same is true for lying. But I stayed, and I listened and I believed. What a fool I’ve been!”

— Robin Hobb

127. “I know you think me foolish, but then, I am the Fool. You know then I must be Foolish.”

— Robin Hobb

128. “Half the evil in this world occurs while decent people stand by and do nothing wrong. It’s not enough to refrain from evil, Trell. People have to attempt to do right, even if they believe they cannot succeed.” “Even when it’s stupid to try?” he asked with savage sarcasm. “Especially then,” she replied sweetly. “That’s how it’s done, Trell. You break your heart against this stony world. You fling yourself at it, on the side of good, and you do not ask the cost. That’s how you do it.”

— Robin Hobb

129. “Who loves you or who you love is not as significant as who you are. Too many folk, women and men, love the person they wish to be, as if by loving that person, or being loved by that person, they could attain the importance they long for.”

— Robin Hobb

130. “To Fitz and the Fool, my best friends for over twenty years.”

— Robin Hobb

131. “So grief has always seemed to me, a time of waiting not for the hurt to pass, but to become accustomed to it.”

— Robin Hobb

132. “Strange, how being left out of a secret always feels like a betrayal of trust.”

— Robin Hobb

133. “Love is more than bedding, boy. If love doesn’t come first and linger after, if love can’t wait and endure disappointment and separation, then it’s not love. Love doesn’t require bedding to make it true. It doesn’t even demand day-to-day contact. I know this because I have known love, many kinds of love, and amongst them, I’ve know what I felt for you.”

— Robin Hobb

134. “The loneliness that can never be filled by anyone except the one whose loss created the absence;.”

— Robin Hobb

135. “Bee. Nothing happens to you. You happen to everything.”

— Robin Hobb

136. “Malta,” he said, and smiled. “Possibly the most annoying young female I’ve ever encountered. Yet lovely. I named a horse after her. Do you remember?”

— Robin Hobb

137. “Too much on my mind. Too many directions to think in all at once. I sometimes feel that if I had time to focus my mind on just one problem, I could solve it. And then go on to solve the others.” “Every man believes that. It isn’t so. Slay the ones you can as they come to hand, and after a while you get used to the ones you can do nothing about.”

— Robin Hobb

138. “For he was the Fool now, all of Lord Chance and Lady Amber and Lord Golden scraped away by sorrow. He was no one’s Beloved now.”

— Robin Hobb

139. “Despite my pain, I felt not the regret of an ending, but the foreboding of a beginning.”

— Robin Hobb

140. “The wise man takes the shortest path to peace with himself.’ Acceptance of what is, that is the shortest path.”

— Robin Hobb

141. “But all know that a woman cannot give her word to anyone, for women cannot possess honor. Women promise, and later they say, ‘I did not understand, I did not mean it that way, I thought those words meant something else.’ So a woman’s word is without worth. She can break it, and always she does, for she has no honor to defile.”

— Robin Hobb

142. “The death of Nighteyes gutted me. I walked wounded through my life in the days that followed, unaware of just how mutilated I was. I was like the man who complains of the itching of his severed leg. The itching distracts from the immense knowledge that one will forever after hobble through life.”

— Robin Hobb

143. “Still I promise myself, “Next time I will do better” in the all-too-human conceit that I will always be offered a “next time.”

— Robin Hobb

144. “There is no path to the future, Fitz. The path is now. Now is all there is, or ever will be. You can change perhaps the next ten breaths in your life. But after that, random chance seizes you in its jaws again. A tree falls on you, a spider bites your ankle, and all your grand plans for winning a battle are for naught. Now is what we have Fitz, and now is where we act to stay alive.”

— Robin Hobb

145. “A small pebble can turn a wheel out of its path, he told me, but warned me that it was seldom a pleasant experience for the pebble.”

— Robin Hobb

146. “This is our last hunt, old wolf. And as we have always done, we go to it together.”

— Robin Hobb

147. “I’ll never miss a chance to remind you of what a brat you were. A gloriously beautiful and very spoiled brat. I was utterly charmed by your complete self-absorption. It was rather like courting a cat.”

— Robin Hobb

148. “Wait for you? Not likely. I’ve always had to run ahead of you and show you the way.”

— Robin Hobb

149. “I wasn’t being fair to expect those things of him. But life wasn’t fair. Life does not wait for any of us to grow up.”

— Robin Hobb

150. “We are marching toward death as soon as we are born. The only hope a man has is that his family line will remain, that his sons will go forward to father more sons, and that his name will be remembered by them.”

— Robin Hobb