Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Ten times dead was very dead indeed.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

362. “It was not that she was a better-tempered person, she decided detachedly. It was that her anger had learned a terrible patience. What good was wasting words on a petty and tyrannical second mate? He was a little yapping dog. She was a tigress. One did not waste snarls on such a creature. One waited until one could snap his spine with a single blow.”

— Robin Hobb

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

369. “I rode a horse, didn’t I, when I had one? Was it because I was better than the horse that I bent it to my will? I’d used dogs to hunt for me, and hawks on occasion. What right had I to command them? There I sat, stripping the hide off a porcupine to eat it. I spoke slowly. ‘Are we better than this porcupine that we are about to eat? Or is it only that we have bested it today?”

— Robin Hobb

370. “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

371. “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

372. “People have to attempt to do right, even if they believe they cannot succeed.”

— Robin Hobb

373. “I once knew of a minstrel who bragged of having had a thousand women, one time each. He would never know what I knew, that to have one woman a thousand times, and each time find in her a different delight, is far better. I knew now what gleamed in the eyes of old couples when they stared at each other across a room... My familiarity with her was a more potent love elixir than any potion sold by a hedge-witch in the market.”

— Robin Hobb

374. “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

375. “Death could make things stop, but it could not make things right.”

— Robin Hobb

376. “The separate parts of my life became like beads and I the string that ran through them all. I believe if I had ever paused to consider the intricacy of all I did to keep those parts separate, I would have found it impossible. But I was young then, much younger than I suspected, and somehow I found the energy and time to do and be it all.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

378. “Isolation was better than shame. I would continue on my own. This was my fight and no one else.”

— Robin Hobb

379. “There is nothing dishonorable about abandoning pain. Sometimes peace is most quickly found when a man simply stops avoiding it.”

— Robin Hobb

380. “Other men might dream of high honors or riches or deeds of valor sung by minstrels. I wanted to come to a small cot as light faded, to sit in a chair by a fire, my back aching from work, my hands rough with toil, and hold a little girl in my lap while a woman who loved me told me of her day.”

— Robin Hobb

381. “Housework was comforting. In cleaning and restoring a room, one could assert control. One could even pretend, briefly, that life could be tidied the same way.”

— Robin Hobb

382. “Men it is who think they can rule others’ lives but have no bonds to them.”

— Robin Hobb

383. “How could the whole world not be as broken as I was?”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

385. “I was lonely, and a lonely heart has hungers that can overpower both common sense and dignity.”

— Robin Hobb

386. “The world had to change and for some reason the prosperity of men always results in them taking ever more from wild creatures and places.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

388. “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

389. “He gave a final shake of his coat. ‘I go to the hunt!”

— Robin Hobb

390. “You’ll do well, if you don’t mire in self-pity. Self-pity only gets you more of the same.”

— Robin Hobb

391. “My fate was a runaway horse, dragging destruction like a broken cart through so many lives.”

— Robin Hobb

392. “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

393. “The puppet dances, He turns flips and he jigs. His painted red smile looks happy but he is screaming, for he performs on red-hot coals. His wooden feet begin to smoke. A man comes in with a shining axe. He swings it. I think he will cut off the puppet’s burning feet, but instead the axe cuts all his strings. But the man with the axe falls just as swiftly as the puppet leaps away, free.”

— Robin Hobb

394. “Be very chary of telling your hoarded secrets. Many lose all power once they have been divulged.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

396. “That most ancient of magics, the binding of a man by the use of his name, gripped him.”

— Robin Hobb

397. “To sate your need without love is theft.”

— Robin Hobb

398. “Death fed life.”

— Robin Hobb

399. “The word of a cat is not to be relied upon.”

— Robin Hobb

400. “The carriageway to the front door was wide, and graceful white birches lined it. In autumn they shed a carpet of gold on the road, and in winter, burdened with snow, they arched over it, a frosted white tunnel paned with glimpses of blue sky.”

— Robin Hobb