Quotes by Joe Abercrombie

“Fear has made them sloppy. The world teeters at a precipe. All scared to take a step in case they put a foot into empty air. The instinct of self-preservation. It can destroy a man's efficiency.”

“If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person?”

“One cannot grow without pain. One cannot improve without it. Suffering drives us to achieve great things.”

“Enough pain makes a coward of anyone.”

“It was a look that gave her a tingle, all right, but not in a good way. In that look she saw her silly bloody hopes as twisted and broken as shed left that Lowlanders arm, and it was no ones fault ...”

“A friendship between a man and a woman was what you called it when one had been pursuing the other for a long time and never gotten anywhere.”

“The truth is like salt. Men want to taste a little, but too much makes everyone sick.”

“Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.”

“Rules are for children. This is war, and in war the only crime is to lose.”

“Those with the least always lose the most in war.”

“Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter.”

“He is dead and I, the self serving coward that I am, still live. Life is not fair. There is no pattern. People die at random. Something everyone knows, but no one truly believes. They think that wh...”

“I'm a fucking coward.""Maybe." Craw jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Whirrun's corpse. "There's a hero. Tell me who's better off.”

“This is stupid.""Look. You think how stupid people are most of the time. Old men drink. Women at a village fair. Boys throwing stones at birds. Life. The foolishness and the vanity, the selfishness...”

“So you love war. I used to think you were a decent man. But I see now I was mistaken. You're a hero.”

“He looked around at that one room, and the few things in it. He'd always thought retiring would be going back to his life after some nightmare pause. Some stretch of exile in the land of the dead. ...”

“Remember, though, that you are the king's observer, not the king's champion.”

“Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit.”

“Shivers heaved out a sigh. Just trying to make tomorrow that bit better than today is all. Im one of those youve got a word for it, dont you?Idiots?He looked sideways at her. It was a different on...”

“A set of huge marble busts stared smugly down from on high: great merchants and financiers of Styrian history, by the look of them. Criminals made heroes by colossal success.”