Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Stop defining yourself by what you can’t do. Why don’t you consider what you didn’t lose?”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

404. “What does who call me when?”

— Robin Hobb

405. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

410. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

413. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

415. “And like a child, I’d be testing the people who loved me, pulling away from them almost for the sole reason of seeing if anyone would come after me.”

— Robin Hobb

416. “Even the homeliest girl secretly dreams that a man might fall in love with her inner spirit.”

— Robin Hobb

417. “Isn’t it strange how wise counsel can cool the hottest head? He made sense but my heart screamed protest.”

— Robin Hobb

418. “Some memories are best left undisturbed. Sometimes, if you forget something, it’s because it’s better forgotten.”

— Robin Hobb

419. “No man can return to being a boy. But there are interludes in a man’s life when, for a time, he can recapture the feeling that the world is a forgiving place and that he is immortal.”

— Robin Hobb

420. “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

421. “I wondered if there was any way to live amongst other people and refuse to be harnessed by their expectations and dependencies.”

— Robin Hobb

422. “There is nothing dishonorable about abandoning pain. Sometimes peace is most quickly found when a man simply stops avoiding it.” He shifted slightly in the dark. “And you never again lay awake all night, staring at darkness and thinking of them.”

— Robin Hobb

423. “It was a terrible division, to feel such need for someone, and yet angry that need existed.”

— Robin Hobb

424. “Could any amount of love ever be worth the pain of losing it?”

— Robin Hobb

425. “Althea had never known that misery could achieve perfection. Only now, as she sat staring at her emptied glass, did she grasp how completely wrong her world had become. Things had been bad before, things had been flawed, but it was only today that she had made one stupid decision after another until everything was as completely wrong as it could possibly be.”

— Robin Hobb

426. “You can wait a very long time for them to give you your freedom. Taking it might be faster.”

— Robin Hobb

427. “Love can exist without need.”

— Robin Hobb

428. “It is difficult to insult the man you don’t speak to.”

— Robin Hobb

429. “I floated. I had been part of something immense, but now I was torn loose. Broken away from the great purpose that had used me as a conduit. Useless. Again.”

— Robin Hobb

430. “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

431. “You are not a man as ordinary men are. They think they have a right to all beasts; to hunt them and eat them, or to subjugate them and rule their lives. You know you have no such right to mastery. The horse that carries you will do so because he wishes to, as does the wolf that hunts beside you. You have a deeper sense of yourself in the world. You believe you have a right, not to rule it, but to be part of it. Predator or prey; there is no shame to being either one.”

— Robin Hobb

432. “Fun, fun, fun, got you, got you, and got you again! Here, you’re dead, here, I broke your forepaw, here, your blood runs out! Got you, got you, got you!”

— Robin Hobb

433. “Understanding how or why is seldom as useful as understanding that things are.”

— Robin Hobb

434. “And that is what you would truly wish, little one? To stop being yourself, before you have even completed yourself? There is so much more you could grow to be.”

— Robin Hobb

435. “Sometimes all the choices are poor ones, Fool, and still a man must choose.”

— Robin Hobb

436. “They do as we do, my dear. They take what joy they may find in life as they can. As you well know that Skelly has run off to do tonight, also. The shadows of harsh times creep over us. For in a battle between dragons and men, my love, it is not only the Elderlings who must decide where they stand, but you and me as well.”

— Robin Hobb

437. “You can’t die from seasickness, but you wish you could.”

— Robin Hobb

438. “Why does the forbidden always add that edge of sweetness?”

— Robin Hobb

439. “Think of what is and don’t let what might have been distract you.”

— Robin Hobb

440. “Battered at my dreams like a moth trying to destroy itself in a lantern’s flame.”

— Robin Hobb

441. “Dragon droppings?” Per asked in awe, as if that were the most fantastic part of their tale.”

— Robin Hobb

442. “We’d had a message from Just, the first to reach us in many a month. He and Hearth had left home almost three years ago. With youth’s fine disregard for the concerns of their elders, they’d sent messages only sporadically.”

— Robin Hobb

443. “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

444. “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. That, I think, is the shock of any relationship ending. It is realizing that what is still an ongoing relationship to someone is, for the other person, something finished and done with.”

— Robin Hobb

445. “They regarded our passage not at all, and by the afternoon I felt no more significant than an ant. I had never thought to be disdained by a tree.”

— Robin Hobb

446. “She had come to letters late in her life, and though she had mastered them, they had never become her good friends.”

— Robin Hobb

447. “But that is not true for all folk. Some folk are meant to argue with fate. And win.”

— Robin Hobb

448. “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

449. “Trust is not trust until it is complete.”

— Robin Hobb

450. “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