Quotes from Robin Hobb

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

It is a heady thing to be suddenly proclaimed the center of someone's world

There is a saying from the Southlands that there is truth in wine. There must be a bit of it in ale, also.

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 there, humans miss them. Some never think of them, of course. But some children, from the time they are small, they look up at a blue summer sky and watch for something that never comes. Because they know. Something that was supposed to be there faded and vanished.

Some part of me knew that was important. That once it would have mattered terribly to me.

Dawn," Thymara scoffed. "I think the dragons meant, "After we wake up and when we feel like it.

a great part of what unmanned me was distress at the destruction of my own body. It was odd to realise that I had an emotional attachment to my own flesh. My deep desire to keep it functioning well surpassed simple avoidance of pain. A man takes pride in his body. When it is damaged, it is more than a physical thing.

Long or short, if you worry about every step of a journey, you will divide it endlessly into pieces, any one of which may defeat you. Look only to the end.

I'll never miss a chance to remind you of what a brat you were. A gloriously beautiful and very spoiled brat. I was utterly charmed by your complete self-absorption. It was rather like courting a cat.

there is no sense in trying to play that game with the past. Here is where we are today, and we can only make our moves from here.

Cats themselves may be very chatty, but they seem to resent it in anyone else. Cats like listeners.

The knowledge that he had left me with no intent ever to return had come over me in tiny droplets of realization spread over the years. And each droplet of comprehension brought its own small measure of hurt.

Tell him that you dreamed of a wolf with porcupine quills in his muzzle. And that the wolf said to you, "As once you did, so I do now. I shelter and guide your son. I will put my life between him and any harm, and when my task is done, I will bring him safely home to you

and to die with the Warrior's Prayer on his lips. For, 'Yes', he had sighed on his dying breath, and all knew that was the ultimate prayer one could offer to life. Acceptance.

for so long I'd been told what the rules were that I couldn't see they were just rules made by men. And if men can make rules, then other men can change them.

Ten times dead was very dead indeed.

This was a young man who had killed, but never before been in imminent danger of being killed. I felt oddly qualified to introduce him to the sensation.

I was as foolish as I had ever been, no, even stupider, for the gullibility of a boy is fatuousness in a man.

If the divine is also female, and the female also divine, then she understands that woman is more than mother, more than daughter, more than wife. Those are the facets of a full life, but no single facet defines the jewel.

Dying is boring, Nighteyes observed.

That no man can truly imagine being happy and that's why happiness isn't for sale here.

You see, said the wolf. He senses me. Not clearly, but he does. Hello, Fool. My ears itch. Outside the tent, the Fool reached down suddenly to scratch the wolf's ears.

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

She is dead. Dead so many years. Who could imagine that death lasts so much longer than life?