Quotes from Robin Hobb

What you are born to be, you will be, whether it be priest or sailor. So step up and be it. Let them do nothing to you. Be the one who shapes yourself. Be who you are, and eventually all will have to recognize who you are, whether they are willing to admit it or not.

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

When you borrow trouble against what might be, you neglect the moment you have now to enjoy. The man who worries about what will next be happening to him loses this moment in dread of the next, and poisons the next with pre-judgment.

You make no sense! You went somewhere to discover your place in history? How can that be? History is what is done and behind us."     He shook his head, slowly this time. "History is what we do in our lives. We create it as we go along." He smiled enigmatically. "The future is another kind of history.

His cracked lips moved. Beloved. He couldn't say the word, but I knew it. And so did his Fool.

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.

Somehow," she said coldly, "you have confused profitable and not profitable for right and wrong. I, however, have not.

When you see me loyal to my family, then you see the wolf.

My perception of my life crashed from high tragedy to juvenile self-pity in a matter of moments.

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

That is one thing that in all my years among your folk I have never become accustomed to. The great importance that you attach to what gender one is.

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.

No being gets to decide what his life is 'supposed to be.' " She lifted her eyes and her gaze stabbed him. "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.

The wise man takes the shortest path to peace with himself.' Acceptance of what is, that is the shortest path.

Perhaps having the courage to find a better path is having the courage to risk making new mistakes.

He smiled, and reminded me that no man could make time, but only use that which he was given wisely.

You're not who he expected you to be; that doesn't mean you aren't somebody. Nor are you perfect. Stop using every mistake you make as an excuse to fail completely.

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

You can be the dead fish. I'll be the old stick

There are always choices. But sometimes there are no good ones.

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

One had a knife. But I had a staff and was trained to use it.

Still I promise myself, "Next time I will do better" in the all-too-human conceit that I will always be offered a "next time.

You have been with me, as close as the tips of my fingers, even when we were years and seas apart. Your being was like the hum of a plucked string at the edge of my hearing, or a scent carried on a breeze. Did not you feel it so?