Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Every small, unselfish action nudges the world into a better path.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

307. “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

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

— 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. “Dying is boring, Nighteyes observed.”

— Robin Hobb

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

315. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

317. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

319. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

322. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

324. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

326. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

330. “We were one thing. Whole.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

332. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

334. “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

335. “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

336. “A while later, I lingered in the hinterlands of sleep. Sometimes I think there is more rest in that place between wakefulness and sleep than there is in true sleep. The mind walks in the twilight of both states, and finds the truths that are hidden alike by daylight and dreams. Things we are not ready to know abide in that place, awaiting that unguarded frame of mind.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

338. “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

339. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

346. “He is very concerned with his dignity, and I think that prevents him from having an interesting life. If I were a boy, and permitted to have an interesting life, I would have no dignity at all.”

— Robin Hobb

347. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

349. “Even now. Even when I feel like most of me is dead, life breaks through sometimes. Food tastes good. Or something Per says makes me laugh. A hot cup of tea when I’m cold and wet. I’ve thought of ending my life, Fool. I admit it. But always, no matter the damage to it, the body tries to go on. And if it manages to, then the mind follows it. Eventually, no matter how I try to deny it, there are bits of my life that are still sweet. A conversation with an old friend. Things I am still glad to have.”

— Robin Hobb

350. “Somewhere in the back of my mind, Nighteyes was frantic. ‘Poisoned. That water is poisoned.’ I couldn’t frame a thought to reassure him.”

— Robin Hobb