Joe Abercrombie Quotes

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?

~ Joe Abercrombie

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

~ Joe Abercrombie

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.

~ Joe Abercrombie

Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.

~ Joe Abercrombie

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 she’d left that Lowlander’s arm, and it was no one’s fault but her own. She shouldn’t have let herself hope, but hopes are like weeds: however often you root them out they keep on springing up.

~ Joe Abercrombie

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 when it comes to them there will be a lesson, a meaning, a story worth telling. That death will come to them as a dread scholar, a fell knight, a terrible emperor.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.

~ Joe Abercrombie

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.

~ Joe Abercrombie

Life's a queue of small irritations with the Last Door at the end.

~ Joe Abercrombie

I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.

~ Joe Abercrombie

You ever have the feeling you were in the wrong place? That if you could just get over the next hill, cross the next river, look down into the next valley, it'd all...fit. Be right.All my life, more of less“All your life spent getting ready for the next thing. I climbed a lot of hills now. I crossed a lot of rivers. Crossed the sea even, left everything I knew and came to Styria. But there I was, waiting for me at the docks when I got off the boat, same man, same life. Next valley ain’t no different from this one. No better anyway. Reckon I’ve learned … just to stick in the place I’m at. Just to be the man I am.

~ Joe Abercrombie

Names turned over by time, like the plough turning the soil. Bringing up the new while the old were buried in the mud.

~ Joe Abercrombie

Bang! The end of his little finger, now, and three more pieces of the rest. His middle finger was down to the knuckle, almost. Severard stared, his eyes with with horror, his breath coming short, fast gasps. Shock, amazement, stunned terror. Glokta leaned down to his ear. 'I hope you weren't planning to take up the violin, Severard. You'll be lucky if you can play a fucking gong by the time we're done here.

~ Joe Abercrombie

One act presses upon another, on a path we have no choice but to follow, and each time there are reasons. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then we look up and find... this.

~ 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.

~ Joe Abercrombie

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.

~ Joe Abercrombie

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

~ Joe Abercrombie

Those with the least always lose the most in war.

~ Joe Abercrombie

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

~ Joe Abercrombie

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.

~ Joe Abercrombie

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 and the waste. The pettiness, the silliness. You think in war it must be different. Must be better. With death around the corner, men united against hardship, the cunning of the enemy, people must think harder, faster, be...better. Be heroic.Only it's just the same. In fact do you know, because of all that pressure, and worry, and fear, it's worse. There aren't many men who think clearest when the stakes are highest. So people are even stupider in war than the rest of the time. Thinking about how they'll dodge the blame, or grab the glory, or save their skins, rather than about what will actually work. There's no job that forgives stupidity more than soldiering. No job that encourages it more.

~ Joe Abercrombie

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

~ Joe Abercrombie

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. Now it came to him that all his life worth living had happened while he was holding a sword.Standing alongside his dozen. Laughing with Whirrun, and Brack, and Wonderful. Clasping hands with his crew before the fight, knowing he'd die for them and they for him. The trust, the brotherhood, the love, the knit closer than family. Standing by Threetrees on the walls of Uffrith, roaring their defiance at Bethod's great army. The day he charged at the Cunmur. And at Dunbrec. And in the High Places, even though they lost. The day he earned his name. Even the day he got his brothers killed. Even when he'd stood at the top of the Heroes as the rain came down, watching the Union come, knowing every dragged out moment might be the last.Like Whirrun said - you can't live more than that. Certainly not by fixing a chair.

~ Joe Abercrombie

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

~ Joe Abercrombie

...Chief without soldiers is just a very lonely man in a big bloody field

~ Joe Abercrombie

Every war carries within it the seeds of the next.

~ Joe Abercrombie

Whirrun ignored ‘em. ‘Then, when I’ve got two cut,’ and he dropped a pale slab of cheese on one slice then slapped the other on top like he was catching a fly, ‘I trap the cheese between then, and there you have it!’‘Bread and cheese.’ Yon weighed the half-loaf in one hand and the cheese in the other. ‘Just the same as I’ve got.’ And he bit off the cheese and tossed it to Scorry.Whirrun sighed. ‘Have none of you no vision?’ He held up his masterpiece to such light as there was, which was almost none. ‘This is no more bread and cheese than a fine axe is wood and iron, or a live person is meat and har.’‘What is it, then?’ asked Drfod, rocking back from his wet wood and tossing the flint aside in disgust.‘A whole new thing. A forging of the humble part of bread and cheese into a greater whole. I call it … a cheese-trap.’ Whirrun took a dainty nibble from one corner. ‘Oh, yes, my friends. This tastes like … progress…

~ Joe Abercrombie

Strange, isn't it,' mused Glokta as he watched him struggle for air. 'Big men, small men, thin men, fat men, clever men, stupid men, they all respond the same to a fist in the guts. One minute you think you're the most powerful man in the world. The next you can't even breathe by yourself.

~ Joe Abercrombie

Armour... is part of a state of mind... in which you admit the possibility... of being hit.

~ Joe Abercrombie

The world is all change, my friend. We all would like to go back, but the past is done. We must look forwards. We must change ourselves, however painful it may be, or be left behind.

~ Joe Abercrombie

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

~ Joe Abercrombie

Enough pain makes a coward of anyone.

~ Joe Abercrombie

Shivers heaved out a sigh. “Just trying to make tomorrow that bit better than today is all. I’m one of those … you’ve got a word for it, don’t you?”“Idiots?”He looked sideways at her. “It was a different one I had in mind.”“Optimists.”“That’s the one. I’m an optimist.”“How’s it working out for you?”“Not great, but I keep hoping.”“That’s optimists. You bastards never learn.

~ Joe Abercrombie

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.

~ Joe Abercrombie

Are you entirely sure of that knot?' asked Morveer. 'There is no place in the plan for a lengthy drop'.'Twenty-eight strides', said Friendly.'What?''The drop'.A brief pause, 'That is not helpful'.

~ Joe Abercrombie

The memories of our glories fade, and rot away into half-arsed anecdotes, thin and unconvincing as some other bastard's lies. The failures, the disappointments, the regrets, they stay raw as the moments they happened.

~ Joe Abercrombie

Men are brittle, I reckon. They don't bend into new shapes. They get broken into them. Crushed into them.

~ Joe Abercrombie

Monza never had understood why getting out a tit or two made for a better painting. But painters seemed to think it did, so tits is what you got.

~ Joe Abercrombie

Memories sharp enough to cut himself on - the smells, the sounds, the feel of the air on his skin, the desperate hope and mad anger.

~ Joe Abercrombie

By swap news do you mean drink? I do, and that excessively.

~ Joe Abercrombie

it was like staring at a whitewashed wall, but without all the emotion

~ Joe Abercrombie