Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Isolation was better than shame. I would continue on my own. This was my fight and no one else.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

409. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “Here we do not believe in wasting time simply for the purpose of impressing others.”

— Robin Hobb

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

419. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

421. “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

422. “Stop blaming yourself. Someone deceived you and hurt you. You don’t need to take on the burden of that. The man who committed the offense is at fault, not the person he wronged.”

— Robin Hobb

423. “What does who call me when?”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

425. “It made me wish there were a place as much me as that place is you. A place I would keep as secret.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

427. “I had no idea what to do with this unexpected life.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

432. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

434. “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

435. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

437. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

439. “As long as you believe it is impossible, you close your mind to understanding it.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

441. “I was confused, thinking that my pain and my loss were one and the same thing, whereas one was but a symptom of the other.”

— Robin Hobb

442. “The hunt for meat is best, but any hunt is always the hunt, and one is never more alive than during the hunt.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

444. “Love can exist without need.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

446. “When had it become so ingrained in her to apologize whenever she wanted something for herself?”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

448. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

450. “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