Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Doing something stupid and reckless is not a better proof of your love than doing something measured and powerful.”

— Robin Hobb

352. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

356. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

378. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

380. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

382. “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

383. “There are few things so tender as a man’s dignity.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

385. “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

386. “Death fed life.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

390. “He felt her dim groping towards him, a plea for companionship and comfort. He didn’t want to give it. But he had never been a hard-hearted man. When she invaded his mind, pleading, he had to reach back. ‘You are stronger than you know,’ he told her. ‘Keep moving. Follow the other ones, my copper beauty. Soon there will be better days for you, but for now you must be strong.”

— Robin Hobb

391. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

393. “We were speaking of people living their dreams, and I said that few do, and even fewer enjoy the experience. For too many, when they get their dream, they discover it is not what they wanted. Or the dream is bigger than their abilities, and all ends in bitterness.”

— Robin Hobb

394. “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

395. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

397. “A moment ago you spoke of love without need. To sate your need without love is theft. If you ust have that, hire it done.”

— Robin Hobb

398. “Love isn’t just about feeling sure of the other person, knowing what he would give up for you. It’s knowing with certainty what you are willing to surrender for his sake. Make no mistake; each partner gives up something. Individual dreams are surrendered for a shared one. In some marriages, one partner gives up almost everything she once thought she wanted. But it’s not always the woman who does so. Such sacrifice is not shameful. It’s love. If you think the man is worth it, it works.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

400. “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