Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 6 of 10

251. “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

252. “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 He had withdrawn his anma into himself as he had been taught to do, divesting it of his anger and offense as he did so.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

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

— Robin Hobb

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

270. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

273. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

275. “Surprise!-FitzChivalry.”

— Robin Hobb

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

279. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

284. “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

285. “He is not my lover. He is far more than that to me, far more precious. I am the White Prophet and he is my Catalyst, and we are come here to change the course of time. I am here to see that Icefyre lives.”

— Robin Hobb

286. “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

287. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

289. “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

290. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

298. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

300. “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