Robin Hobb Quotes & Sayings

She stared at him suspiciously. 'You drank all — Robin Hobb

Life is not a race to restore a past situation. Nor does one have to hurry to meet the future. Seeing how things change is what makes life interesting. — Robin Hobb

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

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

I've returned and I look around me and think, I've missed my life. While I was off and alone, it went on here, without me, and I'm forever doomed to be a stranger in my own home. — Robin Hobb

You are confusing plumbing and love again. — Robin Hobb

Do you not see how strange and wonderful that is? That all history balances on an affair of the human heart? — Robin Hobb

Wide gape the gates of yellowed bone. A tongue of plank is our path between the teeth as we walk toward the gullet. Here I will be devoured. This is a true thing, near unavoidable on any path. I must enter those jaws. — Robin Hobb

Doing something stupid and reckless is not a better proof of your love than doing something measured and powerful. — Robin Hobb

My blood will only buy you that fool's regard. I will pay a high price for you to be respected by a churl. Nothing bought with blood is worth having, young man. — Robin Hobb

Ah, Fitz, you should know by now that every moment of my life is spent dancing. And with every partner, I tread a different measure. — Robin Hobb

And what do you believe?"
A slow smile spread over his face. "I believe in you. You are my new beginning. — Robin Hobb

At what point is a person old enough to say, 'I own my body, and I get to do what I want with it'? — Robin Hobb

About these homes and at the intersections of the roads in this nomadic "city" are the gardens. Each is unique. One may center around an unusually shaped stump or an arrangement of stones or a graceful bit of wood. They may contain fragrant herbs or bright flowers or any combination of plants. One notable one has at its heart a bubbling spring of steaming water. Here grow plants with fleshy leaves and exotically scented flowers, denizens of some warmer clime brought here to delight the Mountain-dwellers with their mystery. Often visitors leave gifts in the gardens when they depart, a wooden carving or a graceful pot or perhaps merely an arrangement of bright pebbles. The gardens belong to no one, and all tend them. At — Robin Hobb

Had they been dogs they would have sniffed me over and then drawn back. But humans have no such inbred courtesies. — Robin Hobb

Cats do not enjoy being reminded of debts.
Cats don not incur in debts. — Robin Hobb

Silence can ask all the questions, where the tongue is prone to ask only the wrong one. — Robin Hobb

Besides, if there were no dragons of flesh and blood and fire, whence would come the idea for these stone carvings? — Robin Hobb

I was lonely, and a lonely heart has hungers that can overpower both common sense and dignity. — Robin Hobb

It was possible to be homesick for a time, and to be lonely for the only other person who could recall it. — Robin Hobb

Dragons. A sky full of dragons. — Robin Hobb

But shall we be happy, to say that we live in the dusk rather than in the full night? Shall we rejoice that we shall only suffer, while your offspring will be the ones to know the torments of the damned? Shall this be why we do not act? — Robin Hobb

It is hard to write down a story that has no sequence or sense, let alone make a picture of what my dream showed me. — Robin Hobb

Useless to worry until we find outselves blocked ... If it happens, then we must simply find a way around it. It may slow us down. But we will never get there at all if we stand still and worry. — Robin Hobb

Petting the cat makes you feel better, Fennel asserted smugly. — Robin Hobb

Fantasy is my genre and my home in the writing world. I consider it the biggest writing room in all literature, where there are literally no boundaries at all. — Robin Hobb

There is little in life so reassuring as a genuine welcome. — Robin Hobb

Shame is not a good emotion for a man to feel. It makes him angry as often as it makes him sorry. — Robin Hobb

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

Some calls you cannot ignore, no matter how it may tear your heart. — Robin Hobb

Half the evil in this world occurs while decent people stand by and do nothing wrong. It's not enough to refrain from evil, Trell. People have to attempt to do right, even if they believe they cannot succeed. — Robin Hobb

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

Fitz fixes fyces fitz.Fatsafices. — Robin Hobb

Do you do this because you live such short lives? Tell yourselves wild tales of what might happen tomorrow, and feel all the feelings of events that will never happen? Perhaps to make up for the pasts you cannot recall, you invent futures that will not exist. — Robin Hobb

That destiny is not reserved for a few chosen ones. Each man has a destiny. Recognizing it and fulfilling it are the purpose of a man's life. — Robin Hobb

Sometimes it only makes one more lonely to know that somewhere else, one's friends and family are well. — Robin Hobb

Vengeance took no account of innocence or right. It was the chain that bound horrific events together, that decreed that one awful act must beget another worse one that would lead to yet a third. It came to me, slowly, that this chain would never end. — Robin Hobb

But he became known as a bad luck ship, mockingly called the Pariah. — Robin Hobb

You should have asked me! You should have asked me!" I hated the tears that suddenly flooded my eyes and how my throat closed and choked me. I didn't want to be sad. I wanted to be angry. Angry hurt less."
p. 501 Bee to Fitz — Robin Hobb

I suddenly wished to go back, to have again each separate day to spend. Time. I was trapped in it, fenced into a tiny piece of now that was the only time I could influence. All the soons and tomorrows I might plan were ghost things that might be snatched from me at any moment. Intentions were nothing. Now was all I had. — Robin Hobb

It's too late to apologize for I have already forgiven you. -FitzChivalry Farseer — Robin Hobb

I want to go home,' he muttered as he totered down the road beside me.
'Me, too,' I told him. And yet it was not Buckkeep that came to my mind, but a meadow overlooking the sea, and a girl in bright red skirts who beckoned me. A time, rather than a place. No road led there anymore. — Robin Hobb

Much later that night, as he meditated in forgiveness of the day, he wondered at himself. Had not he laughed at cruelty, had not his smile condoned the degradation of another human being? Where was Sa in that? Guilt washed over him. He forced it aside; a true priest of Sa had little use for guilt. It but obscured; if something made a man feel bad then he must determine what about it troubled him, and eliminate that. Simply to suffer the discomforts of guilt did not indicate a man had improved himself, only that he suspected he harbored a fault. He lay still in the darkness and pondered what had made him smile and why. And for the first time in many years, he wondered if his conscience was not too tender, if it had not become a barrier between him and his fellows. "That which separates is not of Sa," he said softly to himself. But he fell asleep before he could remember the source for the quote, or even it if were from scripture at all.
p. 313 — Robin Hobb

Perhaps the greatest thing one can discover is that you can decide who you are. You don't have to be whom the Ludlucks made you. You don't even have to be who you were before that. You can choose. We are all creatures of our own devising. — Robin Hobb

Too many folk, women and men, love the person they wish to be, as if by loving that person, or being loved by that person, they could attain the importance they long for. — Robin Hobb

Sa'Adar's eyes went wide. "You're mad."
"Scarcely. Why do people always accuse me of that when I'm arranging things to my liking instead of theirs? — Robin Hobb

I idly wished for something else, for any situation that was neither this forsaken chamber nor the tenseness of Burrich's room. For a restfulness that perhaps I had once known somewhere else but could no longer recall. And so I drowsed into oblivion. — Robin Hobb

You can deny it. But I have been with you, in every way that matters. As you have been with me. We've shared our thoughts and our food, bound each other's wounds, slept close when the warmth of our bodies was all we had left to share. Your tears have fallen on my face, and my blood has been on your hands. You've carried me when I was dead, and I carried you when I did not even recognize you. You've breathed my breath for me, sheltered me inside your own body. So, yes, Fitz, in every way that matters, I've been with you. We've shared the stuff of our beings. Just as a captain does with her liveship. Just as a dragon does with his Elderling. We've been together in so many ways that we have mingled. So close have we been that when you made love to your Molly, she begat our child. Yours. Mine. Molly's. A little Buck girl with a wild streak of White in her. Oh, gods. Such — Robin Hobb

Some speak of the savagery of beasts. I will ever prefer that to the thoughtless contempt some men have toward animals. — Robin Hobb

Be careful with your beak,' I chided her. She turned her shining eyes on me. 'I am careful, stupid Fitz. — Robin Hobb

She had come to letters late in her life, and though she had mastered them, they had never become her good friends. — Robin Hobb

She asked me if the schoolteacher and the horsemaster were still at odds, and by this I discerned that Burrich and Galen's challenge at the Witness Stones had become something of a local legend already. I assured her that peace had been restored. We spent — Robin Hobb

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

But all fires, of wood or grief, burn down to ashes eventually. — Robin Hobb

When you cut pieces from the truth to avoid sounding like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead. — Robin Hobb

It is a sense you do not possess, and hence I cannot explain it to you," she added condescendingly. "Imagine trying to explain a sense of smell to someone who had none. What sounds like an arbitrary, almost mystic ability is no different from smelling apple blossoms in the dark. — Robin Hobb

This, more than anything else, is what I have never understood about your people. You can roll dice, and understand that the whole game may hinge on one turn of a die. You deal out cards, and say that all a man's fortune for the night may turn upon one hand. But a man's whole life, you sniff at, and say, what, this naught of a human, this fisherman, this carpenter, this thief, this cook, why, what can they do in the great wide world? And so you putter and sputter your lives away, like candles burning in a draft. — Robin Hobb

I am shocked to find that some people think a 2 star 'I liked it' rating is a bad rating. What? I liked it. I LIKED it! That means I read the whole thing, to the last page, in spite of my life raining comets on me. It's a good book that survives the reading process with me. If a book is so-so, it ends up under the bed somewhere, or maybe under a stinky judo bag in the back of the van. So a 2 star from me means,yes, I liked the book, and I'd loan it to a friend and it went everywhere in my jacket pocket or purse until I finished it. A 3 star means that I've ignored friends to finish it and my sink is full of dirty dishes. A 4 star means I'm probably in trouble with my editor for missing a deadline because I was reading this book. But I want you to know ... I don't finish books I don't like. There's too many good ones out there waiting to be found. Robin Hobb, author — Robin Hobb

Diplomacy may very well be the art of manipulating secrets. What would any negotiation come to, were not there secrets to either share or withhold? — Robin Hobb

You always chose to be bound by who you are. Now choose to be freed by who you are. — Robin Hobb

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

None of us ever know what we are choosing when we choose life. If certainty is so important to you, than you should have chosen to be dead. That is a certain thing. — Robin Hobb

And a Fool is supposed to be wise? — Robin Hobb

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

No matter what name they call us by, you will always be mine. And I am yours, Bee. And I will always do everything in my power to protect you. Do you understand that? ... I will always need you. I will always want you to be part of my life. Do you understand that? — Robin Hobb

To every creature is given both a place and a time, and when that time is over, we have to let them go. — Robin Hobb

But if she let go of her anger, all that would remain was grief and pain. Anger was easier. Anger could be focused outward. Grief corroded from within. — Robin Hobb

I was dying. And I had never been enough for anything. — Robin Hobb

Girls think strangely, — Robin Hobb

Life is a balance. We tend to forget that as we go blithely from day to day. We eat and drink and sleep and assume that we will always rise up the next day, that meals and rest will always replenish us. Injuries we expect to heal, and pain to lessen as times goes by. Even when we are faced with wounds that heal more slowly, with pain that lessens by day only to return in full force at nightfall, even when sleep does not leave us rested, we still expect that somehow tomorrow all will come back into balance and that we will go on. At some point, the exquisite balance has tipped, and despite all our flailing efforts, we begin the slow fall from the body that maintains itself to the body that struggles, nails clawing, to cling to what it used to be. — Robin Hobb

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

I have since come to know that many men always see another's good fortune as a slight to themsleves. — Robin Hobb

One man armed with the right word may do what an army of swordsmen cannot. — Robin Hobb

Young, Chade suggested. Young and full of righteous fury. Hurt and heartbroken, I suggested. So tired of being thwarted. Tired of being bound by rules that no one else had to follow. — Robin Hobb

Every small, unselfish action nudges the world into a better path. An accumulation of small acts can change the world. — Robin Hobb

He reaches forward slowly, to lift the pen from my lax grip. Wearily I regard the faltering trail of ink it has tracked down my page. I have seen that shape before, I think, but it was not ink then. A trickle of drying blood on the deck of a Red-Ship, and mine the hand that spilled it? Or was it a tendril of smoke rising black against a blue sky as I rode too late to warn a village of a Red-Ship raid? Or poison swirling and unfurling yellowly in a simple glass of water, poison I had handed someone, smiling all the while? The artless curl of a strand of woman's hair left upon my pillow? Or the trail of a man's heels left in the sand as we dragged the bodies from the smoldering tower at Sealbay? The track of a tear down a mother's cheek as she clutched her Forged infant to her despite his angry cries? Like Red-Ships, the memories come without warning, without mercy. — Robin Hobb

No man is so dangerous as the man who cannot decide what he fears. — Robin Hobb

Utter loneliness was planted in me then, and sent its deep roots down into me. — Robin Hobb

I am a minstrel. I know more about lying than you will ever discover. And minstrels know that sometimes lies are what a man needs most. In order to make a new truth of them. — Robin Hobb

A leaf turns in the wind, and you suddenly have a different perception of what colour it is. — Robin Hobb

There were times when taking vengeance for the dead seemed too high a price for abandoning the living. I — Robin Hobb

I should live each day as if it were significant, as if everyday the fate of the world depended on my action. — Robin Hobb

Do you think you're taking Etta out of here?"
"Yes," Kennit called over his shoulder up the sairs.
"What about all these dead men?" she shrieked after him as they strode out of her house.
"Those you may keep," Kennit replied. — Robin Hobb

The fire of my burning past sent odd shadows snaking ahead of us as we made our way into the storm's resurgence. — Robin Hobb

I tried to leave you alone, Fitz. To find what peace you could, even if it excluded me from your life." Ten years ago, I could not have understood the pain in his voice. I would only have seen him as interfering and calculating. Only now, with a son of my own intent on ignoring every bit of advice I'd ever given him, could I recognize what it had cost him to let me go my own way and make my own choices. He — Robin Hobb

There are always choices. But sometimes there are no good ones. — Robin Hobb

What is a secret? It is much more than knowledge shared with only a few, or perhaps only one another. It is power. It is a bond. It is a sign of deep trust, or the darkest threat possible.
There is power in the keeping of a secret, and power in the revelation of a secret. Sometimes it takes a very wise man to discern which is the path to greater power.
All men desirous of power should become collectors of secrets. There is no secret too small to be valuable. All men value their own secrets far above those of others. A scullery maid may be willing to betray a prince before allowing the name of her secret lover to be told. — Robin Hobb

Boredom is vastly underrated. Boredom means that nothing is trying to kill you every day. — Robin Hobb

For the weakest has but to try his strength to find it, and then he shall be strong. — Robin Hobb

He was stupid, stupid, stupid, and his only hope of surviving was in not letting anyone else know how stupid he was. — Robin Hobb

It's all connected. When you save any part of the world, you've saved the whole world. In fact, that's the only way it can be done. — Robin Hobb

They were all gone now, broken or taken by people who had no idea what such items represented. Let them go. She held the past in her heart, with no need of physical items to tie it down. — Robin Hobb

I know you think me foolish, but then, I am the Fool. You know then I must be Foolish. — Robin Hobb

We are the sum of all we have done added to the sum of all that has been done to us. — Robin Hobb

Her stillness was such a contrast to all the jumbled communication inside me that I suddenly felt what a tiresome fellow I was, always filling the air with the rattle of words and anxieties. — Robin Hobb

The same thing I love for are the things I would die for. — Robin Hobb

My head cleared, and suddenly I had heart to fight again, to ignore pain and damage, to fight! I swear I saw myself, face purpled from strangling, the rich blood streaming and soaking and the smell so maddening. — Robin Hobb

I think there have always been male writers, female writers. As a reader, I never picked up a book and said, 'Oh, I can't read this - it's about a male,' and set it back down. — Robin Hobb

There is something about you, Etta. Something in you that cannot be quenched, by hardship or ill treatment. Your soul gleams like silver beneath a patina of hard use. He is right to love you. Any man would love you. — Robin Hobb

Locked into loneliness were we two and looking at one another every evening we each saw the one we blamed for it. — Robin Hobb