Robin Hobb Quotes

“Silence can ask all the questions, where the tongue is prone to ask only the wrong one.”

“Tomorrow owes you the sum of your yesterdays. No more than that. And no less.”

“Very little worth knowing is taught by fear.”

“Look forward, not back. Correct your course and go on. You cannot undo yesterday's journey.”

“How do you politely explain to someone that you had believed for years he was a moron as well as a Fool?
Fitz in Assassin's Apprentice”

“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.”

“All of life, I wanted to tell him, is in our minds. Where else does it take place, where else do we add up what it means to us and subtract what we have lost? An event is just an event until some person attaches meaning to it.”

“Death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice.”

“Come, hunt with me, the invitation whispers in my heart. 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.”

“But a living is not a life.”

“Time is an unkind teacher, delivering lessons that we learn far too late for them to be useful. Years after I could have benefited from them, the insights come to me.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Don’t do what you can’t undo, until you’ve considered what you can’t do once you’ve done it.”

“Nothing takes the heart out of a man more than the expectation of failure.”

“The man who must brag for himself knows that no one else will”

“The fight isn't over until you win.”

“A woman of many talents. And intelligent, too. He'd probably have to kill her soon.”

“Stop longing. You poison today’s ease, reaching always for tomorrow.”

“Not being able to think of a reply is not the same thing as accepting another's words.”

“Thinking is not always… comforting. It is always good, but not always comforting.”

“I healed. Not completely. A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding.”

“Anticipating pain was like enduring it twice. Why not anticipate pleasure instead?”

“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.”

“if love doesnt come first and linger after, if love cant wait and endure disappointment and seperation, then its not love.”

“Diplomacy is the velvet glove that cloaks the fist of power.”

“History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.”

“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.”

“When you spring to an idea, and decide it is truth, without evidence, you blind yourself to other possibilities.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Wolves have no kings.”

“Too late to apologize, I've already forgiven you.”

“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.”

“When you fear to fail, you fear something that has not happened yet. You predict your own failure, and by inaction, lock yourself into it.”

“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.”

“For the weakest has but to try his strength to find it, and then he shall be strong.”

“His absence seemed a solid thing, a burden I must carry in addition to my grief… Yet I knew I would continue to live. Sometimes that knowledge seemed the worst part of my loss.”

“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.”

“Men of passion and vision are often seen as mad.”

“No man is so dangerous as the man who cannot decide what he fears.”

“One can only walk so far from one's true self before the bond either snaps, or pulls one back.”

“We are the sum of all we have done added to the sum of all that has been done to us.”

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

“The fight isn't over until you win it, Fitz. That's all you have to remember. No matter what the other man says.”

“The past is no further away than the last breath you took.”

“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.”

“You are confusing plumbing and love again.”

“Fitz: Shall we get up tomorrow and go looking for a wild pig?
Nighteyes: I didn’t lose any wild pigs, did you?”

“Sorrow and loss never die. We can put them away in a chest and lock it tight, but whenever it is opened, even a crack, the aroma of lost sweetness will rise to fill our lungs to heaviness.”

“Men cannot grieve as dogs do. But they grieve for many years.”

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

“Sometimes a man doesn't know how badly he's hurt until someone else probes the wound.”

“When people look most vicious, what you are seeing is not their animal side. It is the savagery that only humans can muster.”

“I never confuse the cost of something with its value”

“One must plan for the future and anticipate the future without fearing the future.”

“People are intimidated by a man who acts with no apparent regard for consequences. Behave as if you cannot be touched and no one will dare to touch you.”

“I will always take your part, Bee. Right or wrong. That is why you must always take care to be right, lest you make your father a fool.”

“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.”

“To recognize you are the source of your own loneliness is not a cure for it. But it is a step toward seeing that it is not inevitable, and that such a choice is not irrevocable.”

“It doesn't have to be that bad,' Chade said quietly. 'Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too.”

“Justice. There's a thing we shall ever thirst after, and ever be parched. No. We content ourselves with law.”

“One does not need the size of a dragon to have the soul of a dragon.”

“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”