Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “He smiled, and reminded me that no man could make time, but only use that which he was given wisely.”

— Robin Hobb

302. “We were one thing. Whole.”

— Robin Hobb

303. “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

304. “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

305. “Be a man. Discover where you are now, and go on from there, making the best of things. Accept your life, and you might survive it. If you hold back from it, insisting this is not your life, not where you are meant to be, life will pass you by. You may not die from such foolishness, but you might as well be dead for all the good your life will do you or anyone else.”

— Robin Hobb

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

316. “Besides, if there were no dragons of flesh and blood and fire, whence would come the idea for these stone carvings?”

— Robin Hobb

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

324. “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

325. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

327. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

342. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

344. “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

345. “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

346. “Even if you do only a little damage, they will learn that touching you has a price. Some will not be willing to pay it. I.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

348. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb