Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “I have known beauties and joys that tried my heart’s strength as surely as the tragedies and uglinesses have.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

353. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

360. “Death fed life.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

362. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

373. “How often does a man know, without question, that he has done well? I do not think it happens often in anyone’s life, and it becomes even rarer once one has a child.”

— 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. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

378. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

382. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

389. “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

390. “How strange to be loved simply for who I was.”

— Robin Hobb

391. “We live in our bodies. An assault on that outside fortress of the mind leaves scars that may not show, but never heal.”

— Robin Hobb

392. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

394. “If I enter the room as you are fastening your shoe, I can say, “There will be a lovely moon tonight,” and then you will call it to mind. But before I call it forth for you, you have forgotten the moon. One can swiftly understand that for most moments of our lives, we have forgotten almost all of the world around us, except for what currently claims our interest.”

— Robin Hobb

395. “It was all so meaningless when I looked at it that way. It was meaningless in the same way as when I stood up from a game and then looked down on the scatter of playing pieces, and realized that they all were just bits of polished stone on a wooden board marked with squares. All the meaning they’d had moments before when I’d been trying to win a game were meanings that I’d imbued them with. Of themselves, neither they nor the board had any significance.”

— Robin Hobb

396. “Jek is too busy living. She won’t waste time on regrets.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

398. “There is power in the keeping of a secret, and power in the revelation of a secret. Sometimes it takes very wise man to discern which is the path to greater power.”

— Robin Hobb

399. “And for that rush of fury? Time. Time passing with no one trying to hurt you or kill you will lessen that reaction.”

— Robin Hobb

400. “It’s an old tradition or perhaps a superstition. Never call something by its true name if you wish to avoid calling its attention to you. Perhaps.”

— Robin Hobb