Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “You’re not who he expected you to be; that doesn’t mean you aren’t somebody. Nor are you perfect. Stop using every mistake you make as an excuse to fail completely.”

— Robin Hobb

252. “It doesn’t work that way. Silencing memories does not make them stop existing. Events cannot be undone by forgetting them.”

— Robin Hobb

253. “Many great ideas are not unique. They only become unique when the men who have the wherewithal actually to implement them come together.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

255. “I was very tired of being hit, but it seemed like the one thing I did well lately.”

— Robin Hobb

256. “The Six Duchies would fall. The world would end. We went to fetch blankets.”

— Robin Hobb

257. “All memories are connected, and like a man’s skin, they can heal. In time, left to themselves, those memories would have stopped hurting you. You may someday wish you could call up that pain.”

— Robin Hobb

258. “Don’t think of the obstacles that lie between now and the moment when we confront him.” The ship spoke in a low, soft voice. “Long or short, if you worry about every step of a journey, you will divide it endlessly into pieces, anyone of which may defeat you. Look only to the end.”

— Robin Hobb

259. “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

260. “Sometimes thanking someone is more important to the person giving the thanks than the one who receives it.”

— Robin Hobb

261. “That is one thing that in all my years among your folk I have never become accustomed to. The great importance that you attach to what gender one is.”

— Robin Hobb

262. “Some things may be learned from words on a page, but some skills are learned first by a man’s hands and heart, and later by his head.”

— Robin Hobb

263. “Feelings don’t have to be wise, they just are.”

— Robin Hobb

264. “Fitz, you are angry. I can feel it like storm waves lashing my shores.”

— Robin Hobb

265. “There would always be dishonorable things done to preserve the honor of any power.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

267. “Stop using every mistake you make as an excuse to fail completely.”

— Robin Hobb

268. “Surprise!-FitzChivalry.”

— Robin Hobb

269. “Remember with your heart. Go back, go back and go back. The skies of this world were always meant to have dragons. When they are not here, humans miss them. Some never think of them, of course. But some children, from the time they are small, they look up at the blue summer sky and watch for something that never comes. Because they know. Something that was supposed to be there faded and vanished. Something that we must bring back, you and I.”

— Robin Hobb

270. “Boys, I decided, simply have a given amount of rudeness they must express.”

— Robin Hobb

271. “I found myself speaking softly as if I were telling an old tale to a young child. And giving it a happy ending, when all know that tales never end, and the happy ending is but a moment to catch one’s breath before the next disaster.”

— Robin Hobb

272. “We will discover the truth. And face it. And whatever it is, we will go after them. And we will kill them all, like the bastards we are.”

— Robin Hobb

273. “Do not pull back from the pain and imagine that makes you strong. Look at it, you dolt! It is trying to tell you what is wrong so you can fix it.”

— Robin Hobb

274. “Regrets are useless, ” the Fool replied. “All you can do is start from where you are.”

— Robin Hobb

275. “Dying is boring, Nighteyes observed.”

— Robin Hobb

276. “Do you begrudge me that I am who I truly am? Should I pretend otherwise for the sake of pleasing you? If I did, it would be a lie. Would you rather love a lie than know me as I truly am?”

— Robin Hobb

277. “Wide gape the gates of yellowed bone. A tongue of plank is our path between the teeth as we walk toward the gullet. Here I will be devoured. This is a true thing, near unavoidable on any path. I must enter those jaws.”

— Robin Hobb

278. “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-judgement.”

— Robin Hobb

279. “The betrayal of a friend differs from the treachery of a lover only in the degree of pain, not the kind.”

— Robin Hobb

280. “No one can have so little that someone else can find nothing to envy. Poverty and simplicity were not shields from the greed of others. If you had nothing left to steal, they’d take your body and enslave it.”

— Robin Hobb

281. “I’d never been so hurt, and I couldn’t tell if it was what he had said or how I had reacted to it. Stupid boy. Of course I’d get angry and demand to know who had said such horrid things.”

— Robin Hobb

282. “Changes were the essence of life; one should not dread change.”

— Robin Hobb

283. “Be now what you must be to succeed at the end of your journey, and when the end comes, you will find it is just another beginning.’ Althea.”

— Robin Hobb

284. “But a wall that will not yield to a battering ram can still be breached by the gentle twining of ivy.”

— Robin Hobb

285. “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

286. “Be the night. Not the wind that stirs the trees, not even the soundless owl a-wing or the tiny mouse crouched motionless. Be the night that flows over all, touching without being felt. For night is a cat.”

— Robin Hobb

287. “Name it as you will, claim it as you will, the world does not belong to men. Men belong to the world. You will not own the earth that eventually your body will become, nor will it recall the name it once answered to.”

— Robin Hobb

288. “Leave old pains alone. When they cease coming to call, do not invite them back.”

— Robin Hobb

289. “Patience had once counseled me that the best way to stop pitying myself was to do something for someone else.”

— Robin Hobb

290. “We were both smiling, in that bittersweet way one does when imagining something the heart longs for and the head would dread.”

— Robin Hobb

291. “I could set aside my responsibilities to others and live my life as I pleased only when I also severed my ties to them. I could not have it both ways. To be part of a family, or any community, is to have duties and responsibilities, to be bound by the rules of that group.”

— Robin Hobb

292. “Assassins take no pride in fighting fairly. We take pride in winning.”

— Robin Hobb

293. “Veronica: “Perhaps. If Sa’aw had but a male aspect, but recall the old, true worship of Sa’aw, male and female, bird, beast, and plant, earth, fire, air, and water are all honored in Sa’aw and Sa’aw manifests in all of them. 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

294. “He smiled, and reminded me that no man could make time, but only use that which he was given wisely.”

— Robin Hobb

295. “We were one thing. Whole.”

— Robin Hobb

296. “The problem is not that we forget the past. It is that we recall it too well. Children recall wrongs that enemies did to their grandfathers, and blame the granddaughters of the old enemies. Children are not born with memories of those who insulted their mother or slew their grandfather or stole their land. Those hates are bequeathed to them, taught them, breathed into them. If adults didn’t tell their children of their hereditary hates, perhaps we would do better.”

— Robin Hobb

297. “Bee, I will always choose to believe you first. So it is your serious responsibility to be righteous in what you do. It is the pact that must exist between us.”

— Robin Hobb

298. “Be a man. Discover where you are now, and go on from there, making the best of things. Accept your life, and you might survive it. If you hold back from it, insisting this is not your life, not where you are meant to be, life will pass you by. You may not die from such foolishness, but you might as well be dead for all the good your life will do you or anyone else.”

— Robin Hobb

299. “He pleasures his body with drugs and deadens his soul with his savage amusements. Aye, and spreads the disease to those around him, until they take no satisfaction in a contest of skill that draws no blood, until games are only amusing if lives are wagered on the outcome. The very coinage of life becomes debased. Slavery spreads, for if it is accepted to take a man’s life for amusement, then how much wiser to take it for profit?”

— Robin Hobb

300. “A while later, I lingered in the hinterlands of sleep. Sometimes I think there is more rest in that place between wakefulness and sleep than there is in true sleep. The mind walks in the twilight of both states, and finds the truths that are hidden alike by daylight and dreams. Things we are not ready to know abide in that place, awaiting that unguarded frame of mind.”

— Robin Hobb