Robin Hobb Quotes

For better or worse, we live in possible worlds as much as actual ones. We are cursed by that characteristically human guilt and regret about what might have been in the past. But that may be the cost for our ability to hope and plan for what might be in the future.

A few years ago, I actually did come up with a mocking sort of epitaph for myself. It's this: 'Here lies Robert Silverberg. He spent most of his life in the future. Now he's in the past.'

I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?

Toil, feel, think, hope; you will be sure to dream enough before you die, without arranging for it.

Man is an imagining being.

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.

There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.

Everyone needs a fantasy.

People are really willing to believe in impossible things, which is really beautiful.

The Republic is a dream. Nothing happens unless first a dream.

I get the best inspiration or the most creativity from real emotions.

Make-believe colors the past with innocent distortion, and it swirls ahead of us in a thousand ways in science, in politics, in every bold intention.

Feelings are at the basis of all ideas. First you have feelings, and then, through those sensations, it develops into ideas.

Our emotions are constantly being propelled by some new face in the sky, some new rocket to the moon, some new sound in the ear, but they are the same emotions.

The older I get, the more I feel that's all we are: a big bunch of feelings and instincts all wrapped up in some brief encounter with intellect.

We all have the same core emotions of love, jealousy, rage - it's just how they're expressed.

People don't really want reality. They want theater, and that's different.

So actually, for me, 'Doctor Who,' you want it to be the show with all the emotions and all the feels, really, and that you've had a good emotional workout, from laughter to tears to fear and excitement.

The human condition is endlessly fascinating to me, and the existential horrors of life are what drive our imaginations and theater in general.

We're humans, and we're moved by emotions.

You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.

Could the best and kindest of us who depart from the earth have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she (assuming that any Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere whither we are bound) would have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our survivors were consoled.