Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

364. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

370. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

372. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

379. “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

380. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “Stop defining yourself by what you can’t do. Why don’t you consider what you didn’t lose?”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

388. “What does who call me when?”

— Robin Hobb

389. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

392. “There was a danger in asking too much of a child, but the danger of asking too little was almost equal.”

— Robin Hobb

393. “For time is the great enslaver of us all.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

395. “Oh, and you accuse me of flattery! Here I waddle about like a fat old duck and you try to tell me I’m lovely.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

397. “There were times when taking vengeance for the dead seemed too high a price for abandoning the living. I.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

399. “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

400. “It was an impressive display of good food abused in the name of fashionable cooking.”

— Robin Hobb