Robin Hobb Quotes

One little ripple started today could create a typhoon fifteen years from now.

The book says we may be through with the past but the past ain't through with us.

Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

We want to believe that we can continue doing what we've done for the past thousand years and not worry about the consequences coming back to us.

There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place.

The seeds of the past bear fruit in the present.

But you can't start. Only a baby can start. You and me - why, we're all that's been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that's us. This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can't start again.

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

... we are the products of our past. ... a web of complexities.

Everything you do leaves traces, doesn't it. The life you've lived is written all over you, for those who can read.

It's not about knowing who you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. or anybody's. You dont start over. That's what it's about. Every step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it.

If we're damaged it will take 20 years to fix ourselves. It only takes one year to cause 20 years of damage.

How you all will change the work after I am gone. If I came back a hundred years from now, I just wonder if I would even recognize it.

Look at a child and realize that their future is in your hands. It's not just those who will be here fifty years from now. The decisions we make in the next ten years will shape the next 10,000 years.

We are what we are because we have been what we have been.

Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.

If you think about it seriously, all the questions about the soul and the immortality of the soul and paradise and hell are at bottom only a way of seeing this very simple fact: that every action of ours is passed on to others according to its value, of good or evil, it passes from father to son, from one generation to the next, in a perpetual movement.

What goes around, comes around.

Nothing in my life ever seemed to fade away or take its rightful place among the pantheon of experiences that constituted my eighteen years. It was all still with me, the storage space in my brain crammed with vivid memories, packed and piled like photographs and old dresses in my grandmother’s bureau. I wasn’t just the madwoman in the attic — I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.

Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.

Who so ever diggeth the pit, shall fall in it.