Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “Amber?” he said pleadingly. His voice went high on her name and broke, as it sometimes did when he was afraid. “Are you taking my beads away?”

— Robin Hobb

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “Some people say there is relief in the sharing of cares and pains. To me there was no catharsis, only an unearthing of rotting corpses of memories, a baring of still suppurating wounds.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

264. “Everything she sang was true. I will leave it to you as to whether the truth can exist with details omitted, or if those lacks make a lie of it.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

266. “Some memories are best left undisturbed. Sometimes, if you forget something, it’s because it’s better forgotten.”

— Robin Hobb

267. “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

268. “Humans could never accept the world as it was and live in it. They were always breaking it and living amongst the shattered pieces.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

271. “If a man does not die of a wound, then it heals in some fashion, and so it is with loss.”

— Robin Hobb

272. “It was not that these emotions were unworthy or inappropriate; it was simply that they were wasted upon the man.”

— Robin Hobb

273. “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

274. “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

275. “What you are born to be, you will be, whether it be priest or sailor. So step up and be it. Let them do nothing to you. Be the one who shapes yourself.”

— Robin Hobb

276. “Worrying doesn’t solve anything. I know that. In one way I know it but in another it seems wrong. It seems that if I don’t think about all the things that hurt, all the things I’ve done wrong, then I don’t really care.”

— Robin Hobb

277. “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

278. “Surprise!-FitzChivalry.”

— Robin Hobb

279. “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

280. “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

281. “There are always choices. But sometimes there are no good ones.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

283. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

285. “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

286. “You steal the now of my life away, when you constantly fear that tomorrow will bring my death. Your fears clutch cold at me and snatch all my pleasure in the day’s warmth from me. As.”

— Robin Hobb

287. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

290. “If all of her was not enough for him, then let him have none of her and seek what he needed elsewhere.”

— Robin Hobb

291. “It doesn’t matter who a man’s father is. Your parents made a child, but it’s up to you to make the man you’ll be.”

— Robin Hobb

292. “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

293. “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

294. “Besides, if there were no dragons of flesh and blood and fire, whence would come the idea for these stone carvings?”

— Robin Hobb

295. “A boy is a man when he proves himself to be one, but a girl is a woman when she desires to be one.”

— Robin Hobb

296. “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

297. “Men walking a battlefield to search for wounded among the dead will still stop to cough, to blow their noses, still lift their eyes to watch a V of geese in flight. I have seen farmers continue their plowing and planting, heedless of armies clashing but a few miles away.”

— Robin Hobb

298. “My brother! Nighteyes greeted me joyously.”

— Robin Hobb

299. “How often does a man know, without question, that he has done well? I do not think it happens often in anyone’s life, and it becomes even rarer once one has a child.”

— Robin Hobb

300. “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