Top 500 Robin Hobb Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

404. “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

405. “What does who call me when?”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

414. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

433. “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

434. “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

435. “Damn it, a man has to see himself reflected somewhere to be sure he is real.”

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

Featured in: Romance Quotes

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

— Robin Hobb

444. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

446. “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

447. “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

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb

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

— Robin Hobb