The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

by

Jeffrey Hobbs

Jeff Hobbs is the author and narrator of the book, and during his four years as an undergraduate at Yale University, he lived with Robert Peace. Jeff comes from a highly privileged family of Yale alumni, and in many ways his childhood is exactly the opposite of Robert’s: he never worries about money, both of his parents are around to give him love and support, and he’s confident that he’s going to go on to do great things. But in spite of their differences, Jeff and Robert get along surprisingly well; indeed, Robert is later a groomsman at Jeff’s wedding. While Jeff doesn’t see Robert very often after graduating, he respects Robert’s intelligence, calmness, and ambition. In many ways, Jeff admits, he didn’t really know Robert, even when they were living together at Yale. But after learning of Robert’s death, he felt compelled to write about Robert’s life and honor him. Since writing his book, Hobbs has been accused of exploiting his roommate’s death for his own profit, an accusation that Hobbs angrily denies. He’s also established a scholarship in Robert’s name for students of Robert’s alma mater, St. Benedict’s Prep.

Jeff Hobbs Quotes in The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

The The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace quotes below are all either spoken by Jeff Hobbs or refer to Jeff Hobbs. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
“Fronting” Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

Jackie and Rob would eat their snacks on the blanket (never on park benches, because stupefied addicts peed themselves on them), and she'd follow him closely over the jungle gym while her eyes searched always for nails or glass or older, rougher children who had no business on a toddler playground, anything that posed a threat to her boy.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace, Jackie Peace
Page Number: 18
Explanation and Analysis:

As he did so, his confidence grew that not only would this evidence lead to a conviction, but also that a conviction would represent justice in the world. In other words, the defendant was guilty. He did not overlook the many loose ends presented within the story: the single witness who had been inebriated, strung out, severely overtired, and hungover at the time of the murders, and who had identified a suspect, by voice only, whom she had encountered once in her life and never spoken to directly; the very odd time lapse between when the murder was said to have taken place—seven thirty—and when Georgianna's roommate had first called the police two hours later …

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert “Skeet” Douglas, Thomas Lechliter, Georgianna Broadway
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

But still she saw the anger in him, a gradually thickening shade just behind the sometimes impenetrable veil of his eyes. She knew that any anger could be dangerous, and that this particular variety, seeded so deeply during Skeet's three years in jail awaiting trial—nearly a third of her son's life by the time it was finished—was especially destructive.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace, Jackie Peace, Robert “Skeet” Douglas
Page Number: 58
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

After Rob called a faculty coordinator back in Newark to let him know they were okay, the homeowner asked if the boys wanted to stay in his garage until the storm let up. Rob declined; now that no one was going to be struck by lightning or washed down a mountainside, he wanted his group to get through this on their own.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace
Page Number: 96
Explanation and Analysis:

Now, in the spring of 1997, they were young men, leaders who had earned the right to strut the way they did. And three, ten, twenty years from now? On that night, they were confident, even arrogant, that they would rule the city of Newark.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace, Drew Jewison, Julius Starkes, Tavarus Hester, Curtis Gamble
Page Number: 101
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

As Coach Ridley learned that early winter morning of 1998, Rob Peace was one of those students. All the anger Rob felt—at his father's imprisonment, his mother's weariness, his own poverty that tasted like ketchup packets—only seemed to fuel his merits as a scholar and leader, and hide itself behind those ever-rising attributes.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace, Jackie Peace, Robert “Skeet” Douglas, Coach Wayne Ridley
Page Number: 104
Explanation and Analysis:

Mr. Cawley took a dinner napkin with a phone number scrawled on it from his pocket, and he pressed it into Rob's hand. He said, “You can go to college wherever you want.”

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Charles Cawley (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace
Page Number: 114
Explanation and Analysis:

I learned over the course of our conversation that Rob had gone to a prep school, he "played a little water polo," and his favorite pastime was hiking the Appalachian Trail. Nothing he said shaded him as anything other than well-off and overeducated: a typical rarefied Yale applicant.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace
Page Number: 120
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

I told him I'd grown up “near Philly,” when in fact I had grown up in an eighteenth-century farmhouse on fifteen acres of rolling rural hills in Chester County, thirty miles from the city. I consciously failed to mention that I'd attended private school beginning in prekindergarten, and that my parents, who had been married for almost thirty years, had invested their entire lives (not to mention their finances) into taking care of their four children, removing all uncertainty from our formative years.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace
Page Number: 131
Explanation and Analysis:

White students went to frat houses, one of five popular bars, outdoor quad parties; black students did something else, of which we knew little except that rap music was most likely playing very loud.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker)
Page Number: 133
Explanation and Analysis:

This word "fronting" was important to Rob. A coward who acted tough was fronting. A nerd who acted dumb was fronting. A rich kid who acted poor was fronting. Rob found the instinct very offensive, and in college he saw it all around. He felt as though people were in a constant state of role-play before teachers, before each other […]

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace
Page Number: 139
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

I was still struggling to equate the irritating but unremarkable encounter he'd described (I had doubtlessly forgotten to bus my own tray once or twice, though I didn't admit that now) with the profound anger still coursing through him, a few hours and a few joints later. I felt guilty for being unable to do so, for lacking the empathy required to connect a careless prep school slight to a fundamental flaw in the social construct in which we lived. All I said was, "That sucks, dude."

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace
Page Number: 152
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Though he hid that anger well behind the grin and the laughter and the marijuana, Arthur felt it in the jokes Rob made to Laurel and others about their privileged upbringings, in his heavy quietude whenever socioeconomic topics came up in conversation, and in his general disdain of Yale and Yalies. Arthur saw a closed-mindedness that was, he felt, self-propagating and innately limiting. More broadly, he believed these qualities explained precisely how an intelligent guy like Rob would always make life harder on himself than it needed to be.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace, Arthur Turpin
Page Number: 195
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

As a financial master, Mr. Cawley looked at the world in terms of investments, of risk and reward. In 1998, the "investment" in Rob had struck him on paper as one of the lowest-risk and the highest-return; he saw no possible downside in giving this rare boy the slight push (Yale's four-year tuition of $140,000 being slight for a bank CEO worth nine figures) he needed to reach the pinnacle for which he was already headed. Almost a decade later, as Rob broke off eye contact to gaze down at the floor as if there were a pit between them, Mr. Cawley understood that a life wasn't lived on paper.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace, Charles Cawley
Page Number: 282
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

And Rob left, rolling his eyes like this scene was just part of a comedy in which he was the focal point of the farcical behavior of those around him. And Oswaldo understood now with a clarity he'd never had before that all of Rob's troubles were self-inflicted—that on Yale graduation day Rob had stood within reach of everything he now didn't have.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace, Oswaldo Gutierrez
Page Number: 316
Explanation and Analysis:

Her son made sense with numbers. He always had. And now he was thirty years old, taking her through the tiers of retirement benefits. She wished that these calculations hadn't always been so challenging, not in terms of the math but its implications. She knew that he wished the same thing. But she didn't fix any anger, as her son did, to that wish. She'd entertained many such wishes during the course of her life and had long since accepted the reality that very few of them would come true. She'd wished that Skeet had been innocent. She'd wished for jackpots with each crank of an Atlantic City slot machine.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace, Jackie Peace, Robert “Skeet” Douglas
Page Number: 367
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

She parked and placed one foot in front of the other until she stood in the cold, metallic room that smelled of chemicals, and watched the coroner fold the white sheet down from her son's face. She nodded and said, “Yeah, that's Shawn, that's my son.” From there, she drove straight to work.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Jackie Peace (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace
Page Number: 384
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17 Quotes

And yet they still rendered the predictable media spin of potential squandered, the gift of education sacrificed to the allure of thug life, etc., not only simplistic but offensively so.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace
Page Number: 386
Explanation and Analysis:

At a certain point, the lights disappeared from view beyond the trees and eaves of the neighboring homes, leaving the Burger Boyz to sit down once again in the plastic fold-out chairs and wonder how long it would be before the flames flickered out and the lanterns began their descent. And once that happened, they wondered where each would fall.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Victor Raymond, Drew Jewison, Julius Starkes, Tavarus Hester, Curtis Gamble
Related Symbols: Paper Lanterns
Page Number: 401-402
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace PDF

Jeff Hobbs Quotes in The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

The The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace quotes below are all either spoken by Jeff Hobbs or refer to Jeff Hobbs. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
“Fronting” Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

Jackie and Rob would eat their snacks on the blanket (never on park benches, because stupefied addicts peed themselves on them), and she'd follow him closely over the jungle gym while her eyes searched always for nails or glass or older, rougher children who had no business on a toddler playground, anything that posed a threat to her boy.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace, Jackie Peace
Page Number: 18
Explanation and Analysis:

As he did so, his confidence grew that not only would this evidence lead to a conviction, but also that a conviction would represent justice in the world. In other words, the defendant was guilty. He did not overlook the many loose ends presented within the story: the single witness who had been inebriated, strung out, severely overtired, and hungover at the time of the murders, and who had identified a suspect, by voice only, whom she had encountered once in her life and never spoken to directly; the very odd time lapse between when the murder was said to have taken place—seven thirty—and when Georgianna's roommate had first called the police two hours later …

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert “Skeet” Douglas, Thomas Lechliter, Georgianna Broadway
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

But still she saw the anger in him, a gradually thickening shade just behind the sometimes impenetrable veil of his eyes. She knew that any anger could be dangerous, and that this particular variety, seeded so deeply during Skeet's three years in jail awaiting trial—nearly a third of her son's life by the time it was finished—was especially destructive.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace, Jackie Peace, Robert “Skeet” Douglas
Page Number: 58
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

After Rob called a faculty coordinator back in Newark to let him know they were okay, the homeowner asked if the boys wanted to stay in his garage until the storm let up. Rob declined; now that no one was going to be struck by lightning or washed down a mountainside, he wanted his group to get through this on their own.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace
Page Number: 96
Explanation and Analysis:

Now, in the spring of 1997, they were young men, leaders who had earned the right to strut the way they did. And three, ten, twenty years from now? On that night, they were confident, even arrogant, that they would rule the city of Newark.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace, Drew Jewison, Julius Starkes, Tavarus Hester, Curtis Gamble
Page Number: 101
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

As Coach Ridley learned that early winter morning of 1998, Rob Peace was one of those students. All the anger Rob felt—at his father's imprisonment, his mother's weariness, his own poverty that tasted like ketchup packets—only seemed to fuel his merits as a scholar and leader, and hide itself behind those ever-rising attributes.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace, Jackie Peace, Robert “Skeet” Douglas, Coach Wayne Ridley
Page Number: 104
Explanation and Analysis:

Mr. Cawley took a dinner napkin with a phone number scrawled on it from his pocket, and he pressed it into Rob's hand. He said, “You can go to college wherever you want.”

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Charles Cawley (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace
Page Number: 114
Explanation and Analysis:

I learned over the course of our conversation that Rob had gone to a prep school, he "played a little water polo," and his favorite pastime was hiking the Appalachian Trail. Nothing he said shaded him as anything other than well-off and overeducated: a typical rarefied Yale applicant.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace
Page Number: 120
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

I told him I'd grown up “near Philly,” when in fact I had grown up in an eighteenth-century farmhouse on fifteen acres of rolling rural hills in Chester County, thirty miles from the city. I consciously failed to mention that I'd attended private school beginning in prekindergarten, and that my parents, who had been married for almost thirty years, had invested their entire lives (not to mention their finances) into taking care of their four children, removing all uncertainty from our formative years.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace
Page Number: 131
Explanation and Analysis:

White students went to frat houses, one of five popular bars, outdoor quad parties; black students did something else, of which we knew little except that rap music was most likely playing very loud.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker)
Page Number: 133
Explanation and Analysis:

This word "fronting" was important to Rob. A coward who acted tough was fronting. A nerd who acted dumb was fronting. A rich kid who acted poor was fronting. Rob found the instinct very offensive, and in college he saw it all around. He felt as though people were in a constant state of role-play before teachers, before each other […]

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace
Page Number: 139
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

I was still struggling to equate the irritating but unremarkable encounter he'd described (I had doubtlessly forgotten to bus my own tray once or twice, though I didn't admit that now) with the profound anger still coursing through him, a few hours and a few joints later. I felt guilty for being unable to do so, for lacking the empathy required to connect a careless prep school slight to a fundamental flaw in the social construct in which we lived. All I said was, "That sucks, dude."

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace
Page Number: 152
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Though he hid that anger well behind the grin and the laughter and the marijuana, Arthur felt it in the jokes Rob made to Laurel and others about their privileged upbringings, in his heavy quietude whenever socioeconomic topics came up in conversation, and in his general disdain of Yale and Yalies. Arthur saw a closed-mindedness that was, he felt, self-propagating and innately limiting. More broadly, he believed these qualities explained precisely how an intelligent guy like Rob would always make life harder on himself than it needed to be.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace, Arthur Turpin
Page Number: 195
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

As a financial master, Mr. Cawley looked at the world in terms of investments, of risk and reward. In 1998, the "investment" in Rob had struck him on paper as one of the lowest-risk and the highest-return; he saw no possible downside in giving this rare boy the slight push (Yale's four-year tuition of $140,000 being slight for a bank CEO worth nine figures) he needed to reach the pinnacle for which he was already headed. Almost a decade later, as Rob broke off eye contact to gaze down at the floor as if there were a pit between them, Mr. Cawley understood that a life wasn't lived on paper.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace, Charles Cawley
Page Number: 282
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

And Rob left, rolling his eyes like this scene was just part of a comedy in which he was the focal point of the farcical behavior of those around him. And Oswaldo understood now with a clarity he'd never had before that all of Rob's troubles were self-inflicted—that on Yale graduation day Rob had stood within reach of everything he now didn't have.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace, Oswaldo Gutierrez
Page Number: 316
Explanation and Analysis:

Her son made sense with numbers. He always had. And now he was thirty years old, taking her through the tiers of retirement benefits. She wished that these calculations hadn't always been so challenging, not in terms of the math but its implications. She knew that he wished the same thing. But she didn't fix any anger, as her son did, to that wish. She'd entertained many such wishes during the course of her life and had long since accepted the reality that very few of them would come true. She'd wished that Skeet had been innocent. She'd wished for jackpots with each crank of an Atlantic City slot machine.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace, Jackie Peace, Robert “Skeet” Douglas
Page Number: 367
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

She parked and placed one foot in front of the other until she stood in the cold, metallic room that smelled of chemicals, and watched the coroner fold the white sheet down from her son's face. She nodded and said, “Yeah, that's Shawn, that's my son.” From there, she drove straight to work.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Jackie Peace (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace
Page Number: 384
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17 Quotes

And yet they still rendered the predictable media spin of potential squandered, the gift of education sacrificed to the allure of thug life, etc., not only simplistic but offensively so.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Robert DeShaun Peace
Page Number: 386
Explanation and Analysis:

At a certain point, the lights disappeared from view beyond the trees and eaves of the neighboring homes, leaving the Burger Boyz to sit down once again in the plastic fold-out chairs and wonder how long it would be before the flames flickered out and the lanterns began their descent. And once that happened, they wondered where each would fall.

Related Characters: Jeff Hobbs (speaker), Victor Raymond, Drew Jewison, Julius Starkes, Tavarus Hester, Curtis Gamble
Related Symbols: Paper Lanterns
Page Number: 401-402
Explanation and Analysis: