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Robin Hobb

American fiction writer

110+ Robin Hobb Quotes On Marriage, Books And Writing

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Robin Hobb is an American novelist best known for her works in the fantasy genre. She is the author of the Farseer Trilogy, Liveship Traders Trilogy, Tawny Man Trilogy, Soldier Son Trilogy, and the Rain Wilds Chronicles. Hobb is also the author of several stand-alone novels, including The Inheritance, The Wilful Princess and the Piebald Prince, and Assassin's Fate. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Robin Hobb on love, life, marriage.

Born
March 5, 1952
Died
February 3, 2015
Known as
American Novelist

Top 10 Robin Hobb Quotes

  1. 1.
    Boredom is vastly underrated. Boredom means that nothing is trying to kill you every day.
    — Robin Hobb 43 Image Share
  2. 2.
    Anticipating pain was like enduring it twice. Why not anticipate pleasure instead?
    — Robin Hobb 24 Image Share
  3. 3.
    There is little in life so reassuring as a genuine welcome.
    — Robin Hobb 17 Image Share
  4. 4.
    Diplomacy is the velvet glove that cloaks the fist of power.
    — Robin Hobb 17 Image Share
  5. 5.
    When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool you end up looking like a moron instead.
    — Robin Hobb 17 Image Share
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  7. 6.
    Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there any more.
    — Robin Hobb 12 Image Share
  8. 7.
    The man who must brag for himself knows that no one else will
    — Robin Hobb 7 Image Share
  9. 8.
    How different would our perception of reality be if... we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams?
    — Robin Hobb 7 Image Share
  10. 9.
    Someday is someday, and maybe it will be or maybe it won't. This is a human thing, to worry about things that may or may not come to be. You can't eat meat until you've killed it.
    — Robin Hobb 6 Image Share
  11. 10.
    When considering a man's motives, remember you must not measure his wheat with your bushel. He may not be using the same standard at all.
    — Robin Hobb 5 Image Share

Robin Hobb Short Quotes

  • One can only walk so far from one's true self before the bond either snaps, or pulls one back.
    — Robin Hobb 3 Image Share
  • Thinking is not always...comforting. It is always good, but not always comforting. Royal Assassin
    — Robin Hobb 2 Image Share
  • A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Perhaps having the courage to find a better path is having the courage to risk making new mistakes.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Men cannot grieve as dogs do. But they grieve for many years.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Silence can ask all the questions, where the tongue is prone to ask only the wrong one.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
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  • I feared my own kind more than anything the natural world could ever threaten me with.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • When both my editors say 'This is really bad, you need to change this,' I ignore that at my peril.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • The biggest doubts come in the five minutes after I hit send.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share

Robin Hobb Quotes About Love

  • I told you I set no limits on my love for you. I don't. Yet I have never expected you to offer me your body. It was the whole of your heart, all for myself, that I sought. Even though I've never had a right to it. For you gave it away ere ever you saw me.
    — Robin Hobb 16 Image Share
  • You are confusing plumbing and love again.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Love isn't just about feeling sure of the other person, knowing what he would give up for you. It's knowing with certainty what you are willing to surrender for his sake. Make no mistake; each partner gives up something. Individual dreams are surrendered for a shared one.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • if love doesnt come first and linger after, if love cant wait and endure disappointment and seperation, then its not love.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share

Robin Hobb Quotes About Life

  • That is the challenge Companion. To take what has happened to you and learn from it. Nothing is quite so destructive as pity, especially self-pity. No event in life is so terrible that one cannot rise above it.
    — Robin Hobb 14 Image Share
  • We are as we are. How can you claim to know what life I was meant to lead, let alone threaten to force me into it? All your quibbling is nonsense. As well forbid your nose to snuff, or your ears to hear. We are as we do.
    — Robin Hobb 5 Image Share
  • Death is always less painful and easier than life! You speak true. And yet we do not, day to day, choose death. Because ultimately, death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Death is what you get when there are no choices left to make.
    — Robin Hobb 5 Image Share
  • What a man can take with a sword, a woman can give by her flesh alone. Life.
    — Robin Hobb 5 Image Share
  • Death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice.
    — Robin Hobb 3 Image Share
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  • In real life, things don't all end at the nice same place. To keep the story real, there has to be kind of a ragged edge at the end of a novel.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • The truth, I discovered, is a tree that grows as a man gains access to experience. A child sees the acorn of his daily life, but a man looks back on the oak.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • 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 Image Share
  • As I apologized to her a flicker of panic raced through me and then faded away. There wasn't enough life left in me to panic. I'd made a mistake and I was dying. Apparently not even a Speck afterlife was available to me. I'd simply stop being. Apparently I hadn't died correctly. Oops.
    — Robin Hobb Share
  • Leave the pain behind and let your life be your own again. There is a place where all time is now, and the choices are simple and always your own. Wolves have no kings
    — Robin Hobb Image Share

Robin Hobb Quotes About Writing

  • I was dressed up as a witch for Halloween, and wanted to write a story about my black cat before I went out trick-or-treating. I think it went out with the trash the next day.
    — Robin Hobb 1 Image Share
  • Don't listen to people who tell you that very few people get published and you won't be one of them. Don't listen to your friend who says you are better that Tolkien and don't have to try any more. Keep writing, keep faith in the idea that you have unique stories to tell, and tell them.
    — Robin Hobb Share
  • Some people say 'I want to be a writer,' and some people say, 'I want to write.'
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Start writing sooner. Don't wait for permission. Don't hesitate.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Very little about being a writer is signing an autograph. It's sitting in a room and writing. Getting it out.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • I began attempting to write for children under the mistaken assumption that writing for children was easy.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Your future. It awaits only you, to live it and to write it. - Shaman's Crossing by Robin Hobb
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
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Robin Hobb Famous Quotes And Sayings

  • Well,the fun part of being a writer is that it's like making a wonderful film, with no limit on my budget. I can design the sets, the costume, the lightings, I write the script, and then I get to perform all the roles as I step into each character's skin, zip up, and adopt that point of view. So, to me, they are all compelling and fascinating.
    — Robin Hobb 5 Share
  • ...To free humanity of time. For time is the great enslaver of us all. Time that ages us, time that limits us. Think how often you have wished to have more time for something, or wished you could go back a day and do something differently. When humanity is freed of time, old wrongs can be corrected before they are done.
    — Robin Hobb 4 Share
  • Writers really do that. We weep over our characters. We are saddened sometimes for days when we say goodbye to a world or a character. They do become our best friends. I've probably spent more time with them over the past 22, 24 years than I have spent with most of the real members of my family.
    — Robin Hobb 3 Share
  • I think that old magic draws much of its strength from that acknowledgment: that we are a part of that world.
    — Robin Hobb 3 Image Share
  • Silent," the carved wizardwood on his wrist breathed. "Silent as a blinded ship, floating hull-up in the sea. Silent as a scream underwater.
    — Robin Hobb 3 Image Share
  • Besides, if there were no dragons of flesh and blood and fire, whence would come the idea for these stone carvings?
    — Robin Hobb 3 Image Share
  • If a man does not die of a wound, then it heals in some fashion, and so it is with loss. From the sharp pain of immediate berevement, both the Prince and I passed into the gray days of numb bewilderment and waiting. So grief has always seemed to me, a time of waiting not for the hurt to pass, but to become accustomed to it.
    — Robin Hobb 2 Share
  • When we come back to fantasy, I think we're actually coming back to the real bedrock of storytelling. Our national or international genre really is fantasy, if you think about the worldwide myths and legends and stories that we all know, whether we're talking about Little Red Riding Hood or the Arabian Nights or Noah's Ark or Hercules. These are stories that cross many cultures in much the same way that dragons cross many cultures.
    — Robin Hobb 1 Share
  • 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 1 Image Share
  • To be honest, I don't think of any of my characters as minor characters - they're all the main characters in a story that I don't necessarily get to tell.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Every writer knows a lot more about their characters and story than actually makes it onto the page.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • To be part of a family, or any community, is to have duties and responsibility, to be bound by the rules of that group.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • 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 Image Share
  • THE HEIR OF NIGHT by Helen Lowe is a richly told tale of strange magic, dark treachery and conflicting loyalties, set in a well realized world.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Everybody has felt at one time or another that everyone else in the world had a better shot than they did, so when you engage that, you engage the reader, and I think you create a character that brings the reader more fully into the story.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Be a man. Discover where you are now, and go on from there, making the best of things. accept your life, and you might survive it. If you hold back from it, insisting this is not your life, not where you are meant to be, life will pass you by. You may not die from such foolishness, but you might as well be dead for all the good your life will do you or anyone else.
    — Robin Hobb Share
  • I began reading everyhing in the family library. Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe. And of course, if you're running out of books to read you can always read Shakespeare.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • I do not know whom I wish to win; until I do, I will let no player be eliminated.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • You seek a false comfort when you demand that I define myself for you with words. Words do not contain or define any person. A heart can, if it is willing.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Wolves have no kings.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • When you spring to an idea, and decide it is truth, without evidence, you blind yourself to other possibilities.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • I am the King's Fool. He is the King-In-Wating. Let him wait.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Sometimes it seemed to me a cruelty that so much was unresolved between us; at other times, a blessing that a hope of reunion lingered.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Ah, Beloved. Of all the things I must bid farewell to, you are the most difficult to lose. Forgive me that I have avoided you. Better, perhaps, that we make a space between us and become accustomed to it before fate forces that upon us.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Sometimes it seems unfair that events so old can reach forward through the years, sinking claws into one's life and twisting all that follows it. Yet perhaps that is the ultimate justice: we are the sum of all we have done added to the sum of all that has been done to us. There is no escaping that, not for any of us.
    — Robin Hobb Share
  • Remember with your heart. Go back, go back and go back. The skies of this world were always meant to have dragons. When they are not here, humans miss them. Some never think of them, of course. But some children, from the time they are small, they look up at the blue summer sky and watch for something that never comes. Because they know. Something that was supposed to be there faded and vanished. Something that we must bring back, you and I.
    — Robin Hobb Share
  • learning is never wrong. Even learning how to kill isn't wrong. Or right. It's just a thing to learn, a thing I can teach you. That's all.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Cats talk to whomever they please.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise. A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • the greatest danger is always the one we are ignorant of.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • You can be the dead fish. I'll be the old stick
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Look forward, not back. Correct your course and go on. You cannot undo yesterday's journey.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • I never confuse the cost of something with its value
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Locked into loneliness were we two and looking at one another every evening we each saw the one we blamed for it.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • I thought we had lost you. I thought we'd done something worse than let you die.' His old arms were tight and strong about me. I was kind to the old man. I did not tell him they had.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Fitz fixes fyces fitz.Fatsafices.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • No. This is right. I feel it. I am the Catalyst, and I came to change all things. Prophets become warriors, dragons hunt as wolves. Fitz in Assassin's Quest
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • How do you politely explain to someone that you had believed for years he was a moron as well as a Fool?
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Ah, Catylast, can it be that you do not see all the changes you have made? Some by your resignation and acceptance of circumstance, some by your wild struggles. You say that you hate change, but you *are* change. The Fool in Fool's Fate
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • I healed. Not completely. A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • 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 Image Share
  • Stop thinking of what you intend to do. Stop thinking of what you have just done. Then, stop thinking that you have stopped thinking of those things. Then you will find the Now, the time that stretches eternal, and is really the only time there is.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • I wonder if I can write this history, or if on every page there will be some sneaking show of a bitterness I thought long dead. I think myself cured of all spite, but when I touch pen to paper, the hurt of a boy bleeds out with the sea-spawned ink, until I suspect each carefully formed black letter scabs over some ancient scarlet wound.
    — Robin Hobb Share
  • What good is a life lived as if it made no difference at all to the great life of the world? - Fool
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • ...sometimes it only makes one more lonely to know that somewhere else, one's friends and family are well.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Fitz: How bad is it? Nighteyes: Mind your own business. Fitz: You ARE my business. Nighteyes: Sharing pain doesn’t loosen it. Fitz: I’m not sure about THAT.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Fitz: Shall we get up tomorrow and go looking for a wild pig? Nighteyes: I didn’t lose any wild pigs, did you?
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Stop longing.You poison today’s ease, reaching always for tomorrow.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • For, "Yes," he had sighed on his dying breath, and all knew that was the ultimate prayer one could offer to life.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Not being able to think of a reply is not the same thing as accepting another's words.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • But a living is not a life.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • But change proves that you are still alive. Change often measures our tolerance for folk different from ourselves. Can we accept their languages, their customs, their garments, and their foods into our own lives? If we can, then we form bonds, bonds that make wars less likely. If we cannot, if we believe that we must do things as we have always done them, then we must either fight to remain as we are, or die
    — Robin Hobb Share
  • Men of passion and vision are often seen as mad.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Everyone thinks that courage is about facing death without flinching. But almost anyone can do that. Almost anyone can hold their breath and not scream for as long as it takes to die. True courage is about facing life without flinching. I don't mean the times when the right path is hard, but glorious at the end. I'm talking about enduring the boredom, the messiness, and the inconvenience of doing what is right. ~Amber
    — Robin Hobb Share
  • Do you not see how strange and wonderful that is? That all history balances on an affair of the human heart?
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • No man is so dangerous as the man who cannot decide what he fears.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Don’t do what you can’t undo, until you’ve considered what you can’t do once you’ve done it.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • The fight isn't over until you win it, Fitz. That's all you have to remember. No matter what the other man says.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Nothing takes the heart out of a man more than the expectation of failure.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Very little worth knowing is taught by fear.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in such a way that there is no need for its intervention.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • King Shrewd is expecting me, rather he isn't expecting me, and that is precisely why I must go to him now.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • The fight isn't over until you win.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • Tomorrow owes you the sum of your yesterdays. No more than that. And no less.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • If I had a dog that was sick as often as you are, I'd put it down," he observed kindly.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • For the weakest has but to try his strength to find it, and then he shall be strong.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • One must plan for the future and anticipate the future without fearing the future.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share
  • 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 Image Share
  • One had a knife. But I had a staff and was trained to use it.
    — Robin Hobb Image Share

Life Lessons by Robin Hobb

  1. Robin Hobb teaches us the importance of embracing our own unique gifts and talents, and of striving to use them to make the world a better place.
  2. She also shows us that, even in the face of adversity and tragedy, there is still hope and the possibility of redemption.
  3. Finally, she encourages us to be mindful of the consequences of our actions and to take responsibility for them.

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