Mark Lawrence Quotes

Running ain't no bad thing. Leastways if you run in the right direction.

~ Mark Lawrence

We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off.

~ Mark Lawrence

Lucifer spoke thus. Pride took him from heaven, though he sat at God's right hand.' Her voice grew faint, the hint of a whisper. 'In the end pride is the only evil, the root of all sins.''Pride is all I have.

~ Mark Lawrence

No man should go to Valhalla with brothel rash.

~ Mark Lawrence

Death was kind.” He drew a sharp breath. “But no father should have to give such a kindness to his child.

~ Mark Lawrence

Let's go to Valhalla with the sun on our faces.

~ Mark Lawrence

I've never had much use for religion, except when it comes to swearing or begging for mercy.

~ Mark Lawrence

People always want to know things . . . until they hear them, and then it's too late. Knowledge is a rug of a certain size, and the world is larger. It's not what remains uncovered at the edges that should worry you, rather what is swept beneath.

~ Mark Lawrence

When they killed him, Mother wouldn't hold her peace, so they slit her throat. I was stupid then, being only nine, and I fought to save them both. But the thorns held me tight. I've learned to appreciate thorns since. The thorns taught me the game. They let me understand what all those grim and serious men who've fought the Hundred War have yet to learn. You can only win the game when you understand that it IS a game. Let a man play chess, and tell him that every pawn is his friend. Let him think both bishops holy. Let him remember happy days in the shadows of his castles. Let him love his queen. Watch him loose them all.

~ Mark Lawrence

Tell me, tutor,' I said. 'Is revenge a science, or an art?

~ Mark Lawrence

I’ll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment.

~ Mark Lawrence

Cowards make the best torturers. Cowards understand fear and they can use it.

~ Mark Lawrence

Some men are too dull to feel what might happen. Others torture themselves with maybes and populate their dreams with horrors more terrible than their worst enemy could inflict upon them.

~ Mark Lawrence

We can’t be trapped by fear. Lives lived within such walls are just slower deaths.

~ Mark Lawrence

A warrior fears the battle he missed. More than any fight he can make his own, he fears the fight that’s gone, that ended without him, that no feat of arms can change.

~ Mark Lawrence

There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the [the enemy] had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it.

~ Mark Lawrence

It's an irony of our times that men seeking peace must make war.

~ Mark Lawrence

War, my friends, is a thing of beauty.

~ Mark Lawrence

Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.

~ Mark Lawrence

Cold has its own taste. It tastes of a bitten tongue. It coils around you, a living thing, a beast that means to kill you, not with wrath, not with tooth nor claw, but with the mercy of surrender, with the kindness of letting you go gentle into the long night after such a burden of pain and misery.

~ Mark Lawrence

And that’s how it is in this world, boy. Start a tale, just a little tale that should fade and die—take your eye off it for just a moment and when you turn back it’s grown big enough to grab you up in its teeth and shake you. That’s how it is. All our lives are tales. Some spread, and grow in the telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce.

~ Mark Lawrence

When you become a father, it changes you. Snorri spoke towards the fire’s glow. You see the world in new ways. Those who are not changed were not properly men to begin with.

~ Mark Lawrence

Out here you need to live in the moments. Watch the world. You're a young man, Jal, a child who's refused to grow up. Do it now, or you'll die a young man.

~ Mark Lawrence

What saves us all are the deeds of fools as often as the acts of the wise.

~ Mark Lawrence

There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone.

~ Mark Lawrence

Men who’ve made choices always feel they own their destiny. Few ever think to ask who shaped and offered up those choices. Who dangles the carrot they think they’ve chosen to follow.

~ Mark Lawrence

I'm a good liar. A great one. And to be a great liar you have to live your lies, to believe them, to the point that when you tell them to yourself enough times, even what's right before your eyes will bend itself to the falsehood.

~ Mark Lawrence

Genuine surprise is a great help when faced with an unwelcome duty. Of course, when it’s the paying of debts you’re forgetting, that can lead to broken fingers. And worse. I guess it’s a form of lying— lying to oneself. And I’m very good at falsehoods. They often say the best liars half-believe their lies— which makes me the very best because if I repeat a lie often enough I can end up believing it entirely, no half measures involved!

~ Mark Lawrence

Brother Row you could trust to make a long shot with a short bow. You could trust him to come out of a knife fight with somebody else's blood on his shirt. You could trust him to lie, to cheat, to steal, and to watch your back. You couldn't trust his eyes though. He had kind eyes, and you couldn't trust them.

~ Mark Lawrence

To err is human, to forgive is divine... but I’m only a cardinal and cardinals are human, so rather than forgiving you I’m going to err towards beating you with this stick.

~ Mark Lawrence

We all practice self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There's not enough room in a man's head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I’m well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on.

~ Mark Lawrence

It’s often said that cowards make the best torturers. Cowards have good imaginations, imaginations that torment them with all the worst stuff of nightmare, all the horrors that could befall them. This provides an excellent arsenal when it comes to inflicting misery on others. And their final qualification is that they understand the fears of their victim better than the victim does himself.

~ Mark Lawrence

Sometimes our worst fears aren't realized - though in my experience it's only to make room for the fears our imagination was insufficient to house.

~ Mark Lawrence

There are no other choices for you, Prince Jalan, and when there are no choices all men are equally brave.

~ Mark Lawrence

Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.

~ Mark Lawrence

Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you'll find an edge to cut you.

~ Mark Lawrence

I want her beyond reason. I need to own, consume, worship, devour. What I've made of her in my mind cannot live in flesh.

~ Mark Lawrence

You have my advice. Carry it with you. It won't slow you down.

~ Mark Lawrence

When a course of action is forced upon you it’s best to accept it with grace and milk it for whatever you can get, right up to the moment the first opportunity to weasel out of the deal presents itself.

~ Mark Lawrence

I’ve never seen a man who understands so little about women and yet is so led about by them.

~ Mark Lawrence