Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

153. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

155. “If it was raining soup, you’d be out there with a fork.”

— Robin Hobb

156. “But if she let go of her anger, all that would remain was grief and pain. Anger was easier. Anger could be focused outward. Grief corroded from within.”

— Robin Hobb

157. “If the divine is also female, and the female also divine, then she understands that woman is more than mother, more than daughter, more than wife. Those are the facets of a full life, but no single facet defines the jewel.”

— Robin Hobb

158. “We were one thing. A whole thing. You and I and Nighteyes. I felt a strange sort of peace. As if all the parts of me were finally in one place. All the missing bits that would make me a complete... thing.′ I shook my head. ‘Words don’t read that far.”

— Robin Hobb

159. “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

160. “When the bee to the earth does fall, the butterfly comes back to change all.”

— Robin Hobb

161. “A catalyst was DarAles for his time, a changer of hearts and lives. He came not to be hero, but to enable the hero in others. He came, not to fulfill prophesies, but to open the doors to new futures. Such is ever the task of the catalyst.”

— Robin Hobb

162. “Death stalks us, and he is ever sure of his kill. It is not a thing to dwell on, but it is something we all know, in our guts and bones. All save humans.”

— Robin Hobb

163. “Oh, my boy. The best mistake Chivalry ever made was you. Go on now.”

— Robin Hobb

164. “Those were some astounding lies, cub. And the very last one the most inspired of all. You have your father’s talent for it.”

— Robin Hobb

165. “Tell him that you dreamed of a wolf with porcupine quills in his muzzle. And that the wolf said to you, “As once you did, so I do now. I shelter and guide your son. I will put my life between him and any harm, and when my task is done, I will bring him safely home to you.”

— Robin Hobb

166. “Acceptance of what is. That is the shortest path to peace with yourself.”

— Robin Hobb

167. “For a very brief period I was happy, and, an even rarer gift, I knew I was happy.”

— Robin Hobb

168. “That, I think, is the shock of any relationship ending. It is realizing that what is still an ongoing relationship to someone is, for the other person, something finished and done with.”

— Robin Hobb

169. “He longed for cleanliness and tidiness: it was hard to find peace in the middle of disorder.”

— Robin Hobb

170. “It is the nature of humans that we tend to pass our pain along. As if we could get rid of it by inflicting an equal hurt on someone else.”

— Robin Hobb

171. “Is it the nature of the world that all things seek a rhythm, and in that rhythm a sort o peace?”

— Robin Hobb

172. “Time is an unkind teacher, delivering lessons that we learn far too late for them to be useful.”

— Robin Hobb

173. “I have since come to know that many men always see another’s good fortune as a slight to themselves.”

— Robin Hobb

174. “That night I grasped another piece of the puzzle that Burrich had always been to me. For there is a very strange peace in giving over your judgment to someone else, to saying to them, “You lead and I will follow, and I will trust entirely that you will not lead me to death or harm.”

— Robin Hobb

175. “She fell silent, overcome at what humans, in their ignorance, had done.”

— Robin Hobb

176. “Fate rushes down upon us! The time drags and the days plod past, lulling us into thinking that the doom we fear will always so delay. Then, abruptly, the dark days we have all predicted are upon us, and the time when we could have turned dire fate aside has passed. How old must I be before I learn? There is no time; there is never any time. Tomorrow may never come, but todays are linked inexorably in a chain, and now is always the only time we have to divert disaster.”

— Robin Hobb

177. “Sorrow and loss never die. We can put them away in a chest and lock it tight, but whenever it is opened, even a crack, the aroma of lost sweetness will rise to fill our lungs to heaviness.”

— Robin Hobb

178. “He spoke solemnly. “This is our last hunt, old wolf. And as we always have, we go to it together.”

— Robin Hobb

179. “Be very chary of telling your hoarded secrets. Many lose all power once they have been divulged. Be even more careful of sharing your own secrets lest you find yourself a puppet dancing on someone else’s strings.”

— Robin Hobb

180. “The white prophet Gerda was barely twenty when she set out into the world to find her Catalyst. She had dreamed of her often since she was an infant. She travelled far from the peaceful green lands of her birth, going both by sea and by land, to a village far in the mountains where a peak smoked in the distance and glowed red at night.”

— Robin Hobb

181. “As you will, King Fitz.”

— Robin Hobb

182. “As if he hadn’t always known he was loved the best. That he was the Beloved.”

— Robin Hobb

183. “And he is a Farseer,” Dutiful suddenly interjected, startling both of us. “One whose vow to his family has already cost him many things. So, this time, as your prince, I command this, FitzChivalry Farseer. Keep your vow, to yourself. Be as true to your own heart as you were to Verity’s, and to King Shrewd’s before him. That is the command of your king.”

— Robin Hobb

184. “Fitz!’ Motley greeted me. ‘Hello, stupid!’ she added. The.”

— Robin Hobb

185. “Make up your mind. Is Death a friend? Then go joyfully to hunt with it, as I did. If it’s an enemy, then fight it. But don’t sag here like a wounded cow waiting for predators to finish it off. You are not prey, nor I! If we must die, let us die as wolves!”

— Robin Hobb

186. “Better to regret unsaid words than repent of words I could never call back. Who.”

— Robin Hobb

187. “Do not agonize about yesterday. Do not borrow tomorrow’s trouble. Let your heart hunt. Rest in the now.”

— Robin Hobb

188. “If a few students come reluctantly to their studies, then let them go. If all students come reluctantly to their studies, then let your scribe be dismissed and find another. For once students have been taught that learning is tedious, difficult, and useless, they will never learn another lesson.”

— Robin Hobb

189. “Oh, the things we discover and the things we learn, much too late. Worse are the secrets that are not secrets, the sorrows we live with but do not admit to one another.”

— Robin Hobb

190. “But if she is alone now, it is because she chose to be alone, not someone decree if for her. Her life is hers to live, not yours to repair.”

— Robin Hobb

191. “It was all in your mind,” Chade told me sometime later, and it stung that he dismissed so lightly all that I had endured. All of life, I wanted to tell him, is in our minds. Where else does it take place, where else do we add up what it means to us and subtract what we have lost? An event is just an event until some person attaches meaning to it.”

— Robin Hobb

192. “My silences he mistook for a lack of wit rather than a lack of any need to speak.”

— Robin Hobb

193. “I told you it was foolish. But feelings do not have to be wise. Feelings just are.”

— Robin Hobb

194. “I am too swift of tongue. But I think that is the best way to talk to a dragon.”

— Robin Hobb

195. “A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.”

— Robin Hobb

196. “She is dead. Dead so many years. Who could imagine that death lasts so much longer than life?”

— Robin Hobb

197. “When we are children, we believe that our elders know all and that even when we cannot understand the world, they can make sense of it. Even after we are grown, in moments of fear or sorrow, we still turn instinctively to the older generation, hoping to finally learn some great hidden lesson about death and pain. Only to learn instead that the only lesson is that life goes on.”

— Robin Hobb

198. “Open your eyes. This horrible mess is your life. There is no sense in waiting for it to get better. Stop putting it off and live it.”

— Robin Hobb

199. “I suddenly wished to go back, to have again each separate day to spend. Time. I was trapped in it, fenced into a tiny piece of now that was the only time I could influence. All the soons and tomorrows I might plan were ghost things that might be snatched from me at any moment. Intentions were nothing. Now was all I had.”

— Robin Hobb

200. “But we are two old men, who have grown old together. Sometimes that is a greater closeness. We have come through time to your day and age. We can talk together, quietly, and share memories of a time that exists no more. I can tell you how it was, but it is not the same. It is like being two foreigners, trapped in a land we have come to, unable to return to our own, and having only each other to confirm the reality of the place we once lived.”

— Robin Hobb