Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Words do not contain or define any person. A heart can, if it is willing.”

— Robin Hobb

202. “All this guilt and shame and remorse you carry, Kestrel. Don’t you see? That is what they burned you with. And you have added to it, all these years. The wall is of your own making. Take it down. Forgive yourself. Come out.”

— Robin Hobb

203. “And so the Wolf of the West rose from the stone! And so he will rise again if ever the folk of the Six Duchies call to him in need.”

— Robin Hobb

204. “Once one knows what heartless people can do, it cannot be entirely forgotten. It always remains among the possible things that can befall you.”

— Robin Hobb

205. “Our own ambitions and tasks that we set for ourselves, the framework we attempt to impose upon the world, is no more than a shadow of a tree cast across the snow. It will change as the sun moves, be swallowed in the night, sway with the wind, and when the smooth snow vanishes, it will lie distorted upon the uneven earth. But the tree continues to be. Do you understand that?”

— Robin Hobb

206. “Don’t go mooning after the stars, when the wide sea is all around you. It’s a sky of its own, you know.”

— Robin Hobb

207. “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

208. “It’s not the sort of thing one asks of a friend. He hasn’t offered, and I will not ask it. I will not tear him that way. I am trying to let go. I don’t know how.”

— Robin Hobb

209. “I don’t want to have these burdens. But I can’t bear to turn them over to anyone else, either. Because, despite all the work, I like being in control of my own life.”

— Robin Hobb

210. “It was possible to be homesick for a time, and to be lonely for the only other person who could recall it.”

— Robin Hobb

211. “There is something about you, Etta. Something in you that cannot be quenched, by hardship or ill treatment. Your soul gleams like silver beneath a patina of hard use. He is right to love you. Any man would love you.”

— Robin Hobb

212. “And tomorrow we’ll do the same again. And again. Until one day you get up and find out that whatever it was didn’t kill you after all.”

— Robin Hobb

213. “Perhaps the gods punish us by bringing us face to face with our own foolish mistakes, condemning us to watch our children fall into the same traps that crippled us.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

215. “I had read a poem about a girl with ‘silvery laughter’ but Shun’s sounded to me as if someone had fallen down a long flight of steps with a basket of cheap tin pans.”

— Robin Hobb

216. “But all fires, of wood or grief, burn down to ashes eventually.”

— Robin Hobb

217. “Sound seemed muted, and night darker, scent and taste dulled. It was as if the world had been robbed of its brightness. He had left me behind to dwell alone in a dimmed and stale place.”

— Robin Hobb

218. “When one has been disappointed for so long, hope becomes the enemy. One cannot be dashed to the earth unless one is lifted first, and I learned to avoid hope.”

— Robin Hobb

219. “Death does not conquer. It threatens, but it cannot subdue the future. What must be, will be.”

— Robin Hobb

220. “His heart had pounded with joy at the thought that he might catch her, might playfully hold her in his arms, for just a moment. They were children, I suddenly saw, children at play, only a handful of years older than I was now. They had never grown older, neither one of them, not really. All their lives she had remained that girl to him, that wondrous girl just a few years older than he was, but so worldly wise, so female to all that was so male in his life.”

— Robin Hobb

221. “You see, said the wolf. He senses me. Not clearly, but he does. Hello, Fool. My ears itch. Outside the tent, the Fool reached down suddenly to scratch the wolf’s ears.”

— Robin Hobb

222. “There is no such thing as an extraordinary coincidence. There is only destiny.”

— Robin Hobb

223. “At the moment of deciding not to argue further, he had given up all emotional investment in the situation. He had withdrawn his anma into himself as he had been taught to do, divesting it of his anger and offense as he did so. It was not that these emotions were unworthy or inappropriate; it was simply that they were wasted upon the man. He swept his mind clean of reactions to the filthy blanket. By the time he reached the foredeck, he had regained not just calmness, but wholeness.”

— Robin Hobb

224. “Perhaps the greatest thing one can discover is that you can decide who you are. You don’t have to be whom the Ludlucks made you. You don’t even have to be who you were before that. You can choose. We are all creatures of our own devising.”

— Robin Hobb

225. “I was sick of strife, and weary of being wary.”

— Robin Hobb

226. “Dragons don’t bother with introductions.”

— Robin Hobb

227. “I will always take your part, Bee. Right or wrong. That is why you must always take care to be right, lest you make your father a fool.”

— Robin Hobb

228. “When circumstances are right, unlikely people do extraordinary things.”

— Robin Hobb

229. “In my opinion, men deny animals have feelings and thoughts for one basic reason: so they won’t feel guilty about what they do to them. But.”

— Robin Hobb

230. “When people look most vicious, what you are seeing is not their animal side. It is the savagery that only humans can muster.”

— Robin Hobb

231. “I can take all my pasts, keep them and determine my own future. I don’t have to be what anyone made me, Brashen. I can be Paragon.”

— Robin Hobb

232. “When the mainstay of one’s world is taken away, it’s only natural to cling to all the rest, to try desperately to keep things as close to the way they were as one can.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “But no one can ever go back to yesterday.”

— Robin Hobb

233. “Sometimes, when one goes back to the scene of one’s childhood, things seem smaller. What was mysterious and the sole province of adults suddenly seems commonplace and mundane when viewed with mature eyes.”

— Robin Hobb

234. “It is an odd language, yours. You speak of passing time as in the Mountains we speak of passing wind. As if it were a thing to be gotten rid of.”

— Robin Hobb

235. “The sheer improbability of your existence took my breath away.”

— Robin Hobb

236. “I lied!′ I spat my whisper at him. ‘I knew you read my journal. I knew you read my dreams. I wrote there what I thought would hurt you most! I lied to hurt you. For letting him be dead while you lived. For being loved by him more than he loved me!’ I took a breath. ‘He loved you more than he ever loved any of the rest of us!”

— Robin Hobb

237. “One does not have to be Witted to know the companionship of a beast, and to know that the friendship of an animal is every bit as rich and complicated as that of a man or woman.”

— Robin Hobb

238. “When you borrow trouble against what might be, you neglect the moment you have now to enjoy. The man who worries about what will next be happening to him loses this moment in dread of the next, and poisons the next with pre-judgment.”

— Robin Hobb

239. “You know what I feel for you. You have known it for years. Let us not, you and I, alone here, pretend that you don’t. You know I love you. I always have. I always will.”

— Robin Hobb

240. “The truth doesn’t need you to recognize it, young man, for it to be so. You need the truth to recognize you.”

— Robin Hobb

241. “She wears a freedom ring in one ear, you know, the earring that Chalcedean freed-slaves must purchase and wear to prove they have been granted their freedom. I asked her once if she had bought her freedom, or if it had belonged to her mother. She was quiet for a time, and then said it was a gift from her one true love.”

— Robin Hobb

242. “He thought perhaps it was a woman’s way, to come out of such a storm of emotion and pain as if she were a ship emerging onto calm seas. She had seemed, not at peace, but emptied of sorrow. As if she had run out of that particular emotion and no other one arose to take its place.”

— Robin Hobb

243. “Sometimes it is easier to pull a knife out of a man than to ask him to forget words you have uttered.”

— Robin Hobb

244. “Maybe you have to keep your pain and loss to know that you can survive whatever life deals you. Perhaps without putting your pain in its place in your life, you became something of a coward.”

— Robin Hobb

245. “Cruelty is a skill taught not only by example, but also by experience of it.”

— Robin Hobb

246. “In politics, appearance matters more than truth.”

— Robin Hobb

247. “There was always something to be learned from any experience, no matter how horrendous. As long as a man kept sight of that, his spirit could prevail against anything. It was only when one gave in and believed the universe to be nothing more than a chaotic collection of unfortunate or cruel events that one’s spirit could be crushed.”

— Robin Hobb

248. “Nothing is really lost. Shapes change. But it’s never completely gone.”

— Robin Hobb

249. “Who had that young man been who had thought himself so old and worldly-wise? He was a stranger to me now.”

— Robin Hobb

250. “People are intimidated by a man who acts with no apparent regard for consequences. Behave as if you cannot be touched and no one will dare to touch you.”

— Robin Hobb