Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 7 of 10

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

— Robin Hobb

302. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

309. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

311. “Look at her. The sun soaks right int her and shines back out of her. She’s magnificent.”

— Robin Hobb

312. “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

313. “Each circle spins off a circle of its own. Each one seems a new thing but in truth it is not. It is just our most recent attempt to correct old errors, to undo old wrongs done to us, and to make up for things we have neglected. In each cycle, we may correct old errors, but I think we make as many new ones. Yet what is our alternative? To commit the same old errors again? Perhaps having the courage to find a better path is having the courage to risk making new mistakes.”

— Robin Hobb

314. “Choose a place to take a stand. Not where they can corner you but not where they can surround you, either. Find a weapon, a stick, a rock, anything. If you cannot escape, make them pay as dearly as you can for capturing you. Fight them all the way.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

316. “Name it as you will, claim it as you will, the world does not belong to men. Men belong to the world.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

318. “I have known beauties and joys that tried my heart’s strength as surely as the tragedies and uglinesses have.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

320. “Then in general charge of the pack beasts and wagon animals. But it wasn’t just work he taught me. Cleanliness. Honesty. He put a value on what my mother and grandmother had tried to instill in me so long ago. He showed them to me as a man’s values, not just manners for inside a woman’s house. He taught me to be a man, not a beast in a man’s shape. He made me see it was more than rules, it was a way of being. A life, rather than a living.” He.”

— Robin Hobb

321. “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

322. “Doing something stupid and reckless is not a better proof of your love than doing something measured and powerful.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “Surrendering that pain to stone had deadened me in a way that was a relief, but there was a darker side to that forgetting. I’ve seen folk who numbed their pain with strong drink or Smoke or other herbs and always the loss of their pain made them less connected. Less human. And so it was with me. Every.”

— Robin Hobb

328. “I have been in howling storms in which a shout is reduced to a whisper, moved across the sea’s featureless face in a gray fog that does not yield to human eyes.”

— Robin Hobb

329. “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

330. “Cats themselves may be very chatty, but they seem to resent it in anyone else. Cats like listeners.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever.”

— Robin Hobb

337. “This terrible event – whatever it was – is over and done. Cling to it and let it shape you and you are doomed to live it forever. You are granting it power over you. Set it aside, and shape your future as you wish it to be, in spite of what happened to you. Then you have seized control of it.”

— Robin Hobb

338. “If he ever wanted vengeance on me for all I did, he has it now. This is the worst thing he could do to me. Now I know how it feels to be left behind. As I left him.”

— Robin Hobb

339. “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

340. “Something clamped tight inside her suddenly eased. He had been right. She did not have to grip her pain. She could let it go. The memory was still there. It had not vanished, but it had changed. It was a memory, a thing from her past. This wound could close and heal. The injury done to her was over. She did not have to keep it as a part of herself. She could allow herself to heal. Her tears were diluted in the rain that ran down her face.”

— Robin Hobb

341. “We did hard things for each other. Risked our lives. Gave up our lives and faced death, and then faced life again. You might be surprised to find that facing life can be much harder than facing death.”

— Robin Hobb

342. “And the world re-ordered itself around me. I spoke each word carefully. ‘You are so stupid.”

— Robin Hobb

343. “This was misery that could not yield, for he sorrowed for a time he could not return to, and a self he would never again be.”

— Robin Hobb

344. “It was as if I had been following a narrow trail, and had suddenly realized that at any time I could leave it and strike out cross-country.”

— Robin Hobb

345. “We didn’t have to share a mind to share a heart.”

— Robin Hobb

346. “Some part of me knew that was important. That once it would have mattered terribly to me.”

— Robin Hobb

347. “Ten times dead was very dead indeed.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

349. “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

350. “If one bad thing befell me, I immediately linked it to every bad thing that had happened in the last week or might happen in the coming week. And when I became sad, I was prone to wallow in grief, piling up my woes and sprawling on them like a dragon on a hoard.”

— Robin Hobb