Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

308. “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

309. “For her part, she seemed totally unaware of how her eyes could meet mine and turn my tongue to leather in my mouth. No magic I possessed, no Skill, no Wit, was proof against the accidental touch of her hand against mine, nor could defend me against the awkwardness that overwhelmed me at the quirk of her smile.”

— Robin Hobb

310. “Some things cannot be solved,” he pointed out philosophically. “Drink makes those things much more tolerable.”

— Robin Hobb

311. “There is no more slippery task than to refrain from thinking of something.”

— Robin Hobb

312. “There is, in all honesty, no way to kill someone mercifully. There are those who count it no crime to drown an imperfect newborn in warm water, as if the infant will not struggle desperately to draw air into its lungs. Did it not try to breathe, it would not drown. But they do not hear the screams nor feel the darkening of the mind that the child endures, so they have been merciful. To themselves. This is true of most “mercy killings.”

— Robin Hobb

313. “The knowledge that he had left me with no intent ever to return had come over me in tiny droplets of realization spread over the years. And each droplet of comprehension brought its own small measure of hurt... He had wished me well in finding my own fate to follow, and I never doubted his sincerity. But it had taken me years to accept that his absence in my life was a deliberate finality, an act he had chosen, a thing completed even as some part of my soul still dangled, waiting for his return.”

— Robin Hobb

314. “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

315. “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

316. “There is power in the keeping of a secret, and power in the revelation of a secret. Sometimes it takes very wise man to discern which is the path to greater power.”

— Robin Hobb

317. “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

318. “You have a wild young heart. Right now, it is like a caged bird that batters itself against the bars. To struggle harder will only hurt you more. Wait, be patient. Your time will come to fly. And when it does, you must be strong, not bloodied and weary.”

— Robin Hobb

319. “Every small, unselfish action nudges the world into a better path.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

321. “It is hard for loneliness to gaze on happiness.”

— Robin Hobb

322. “But change proves that you are still alive. Change often measures our tolerance for folk different from ourselves. Can we accept their languages, their customs, their garments, and their foods into our own lives? If we can, then we form bonds, bonds that make wars less likely. If we cannot, if we believe that we must do things as we have always done them, then we must either fight to remain as we are, or die.”

— Robin Hobb

323. “The fire of my burning past sent odd shadows snaking ahead of us as we made our way into the storm’s resurgence.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

325. “How much do you understand?’ I demanded of her one afternoon. She cocked her head at me, met my gaze and demanded, ‘How much do YOU understand?”

— Robin Hobb

326. “Hold the cat. You’ll feel better. I don’t think so. He rubbed against my leg insistently. Hold the cat. I don’t want to hold the cat. He reared up suddenly on his hind legs, and hooked his vicious little front claws into both flesh and leggings. Don’t talk back! Pick up the cat.”

— Robin Hobb

327. “Strangers had small interest in hurting you. That was always done best by your own family and friends.”

— Robin Hobb

328. “Justice. There’s a thing we shall ever thirst after, and ever be parched.”

— Robin Hobb

329. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

331. “Vengeance took no account of innocence or right. It was the chain that bound horrific events together, that decreed that one awful act must beget another worse one that would lead to yet a third. It came to me, slowly, that this chain would never end.”

— Robin Hobb

332. “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

333. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

335. “Blind funny little creatures they were, fumbling in the midst of a love they feared to acknowledge. To win, all they had to do was surrender but they could not perceive that. The beauty of what they could have been together made him ache. Is was a love he had been seeking all his life, a love to redeem and perfect him. That which he most desired, they feared and avoided.”

— Robin Hobb

336. “As it was with dragons, so it is with queens. A careless word or deed could have severe consequences. Inside.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

338. “Sweet Eda. Fitz, he has your face. Right down to the break in your nose.” Amber cleared her throat. She spoke breathlessly into our shocked silence. “Fitz. Please. I can explain everything.”

— Robin Hobb

339. “Her nakedness was not vulnerability, but armour.”

— Robin Hobb

340. “Take all self-determination from a man’s life, and all that is left for him to do is complain.”

— Robin Hobb

341. “Any future can be!” she replied, laughing at me. “If it were not so, if it were fixed, it would be a past. You say a foolish thing. How can a future be impossible?”

— Robin Hobb

342. “Silence keeps a secret. I understand.’ I.”

— Robin Hobb

343. “All that is of dragons belongs only to dragons.”

— Robin Hobb

344. “Have you ever suddenly realized that there was someone you loved, but presently did not like very much?”

— Robin Hobb

345. “When you borrow trouble against what might be, you neglect the moment you have now to enjoy.”

— Robin Hobb

346. “I felt a familiar squeezing in what I thought must be my heart. I had heard of being “heartbroken” or “heavy-hearted” but I had never known it was an actual sensation one felt when the whole world abandons you.”

— Robin Hobb

347. “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

348. “Oh, the power that lurks in the naming of names.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

350. “There can be no misunderstandings if there are no understandings at all.”

— Robin Hobb