Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “She knew, with vast certainty, that she would never desire to be kissed by a man who had first asked her permission.”

— Robin Hobb

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

258. “Surprise!-FitzChivalry.”

— Robin Hobb

259. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

261. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

264. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

283. “Dying is boring, Nighteyes observed.”

— Robin Hobb

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

288. “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

289. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

291. “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

292. “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

293. “Keeping a child from harm is not the same as rearing one.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

295. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

297. “There is a saying from the Southlands that there is truth in wine. There must be a bit of it in ale, also.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

299. “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

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

— Robin Hobb