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

252. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

254. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

271. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

273. “Surprise!-FitzChivalry.”

— Robin Hobb

274. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

276. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

289. “In the dead of night I stirred. Wakefulness flowed back into me. I was a cup full of sorrow, but that sorrow was stilled, like a pain that abates as long as one does not move.”

— Robin Hobb

290. “As much as I had always longed to be freed of my duties and obligations, being released from such bonds was as much a severing as an emancipation.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

293. “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

294. “Horns not grown, he swings his head in warning and still all take heed.”

— Robin Hobb

295. “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

296. “Dying is boring, Nighteyes observed.”

— Robin Hobb

297. “Once she would have found him mysterious and alluring. She had grown wiser. Dangerous men were neither romantic nor exotic; they were men who could hurt you.”

— Robin Hobb

298. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb