Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Cats themselves may be very chatty, but they seem to resent it in anyone else. Cats like listeners.”

— Robin Hobb

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

356. “Death fed life.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

368. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

389. “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

390. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

393. “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

394. “I was dying. And I had never been enough for anything.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

397. “What does who call me when?”

— Robin Hobb

398. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb