Mark Lawrence Quotes

I have been too young to know, and I have been too old to care. It’s in that oh so narrow slice between that memories are made.

~ Mark Lawrence

Sometimes I wished I could cut away old memories and let the wind take them. If a sharp knife could pare away the weakness of those days, I would slice until nothing but the hard lessons remained.

~ Mark Lawrence

Every star, turning in the black depth of heaven, burns for no better reason than that humanity raised its face to look. Every great deed needs to be witnessed. Go out there and do something great.

~ Mark Lawrence

I’m a liar and a cheat and a coward, but I will never, ever, let a friend down. Unless of course not letting them down requires honesty, fair play, or bravery.

~ Mark Lawrence

Truth is a weapon and lies are a necessary shield.

~ Mark Lawrence

It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears.

~ Mark Lawrence

A book is as dangerous as any journey you might take. The person who closes the back cover may not be the same one that opened the front one. Treat them with respect.

~ Mark Lawrence

Dark times call for dark choices. Choose me.

~ Mark Lawrence

When you've committed yourself to violence it takes an almost inhuman effort to stop short. It's one of those things that once you've started need to be finished, rather like coitus, interrupting that's a sin, even the priests say so.

~ Mark Lawrence

The way I’d put it,” said Makin, “is that Rike can’t make an omelet without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails as a necklace.

~ Mark Lawrence

Part of the art of survival as a coward is not letting things get to the point where that cowardice is exposed.

~ Mark Lawrence

Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you. Makes you predictable, makes you weak.

~ Mark Lawrence

Revenge is a business of calculation, best served cold. Rescue holds more of sacrifice, suicidal danger, and all manner of other madness that should have me running in the opposite direction.

~ Mark Lawrence

Thorn stood without motion, for only when you are truly still can you be the centre. She stood without sound, for only silent can you listen. She stood without fear, for only the fearless can understand their peril.Thorn waited. Fearless as flowers, bright, fragile, open to the sky. Brave, as only those who’ve already lost can be.

~ Mark Lawrence

As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.

~ Mark Lawrence

He broke off his explanation, seeing in his daughter's eyes the exact moment that a child first understands there are limits on what her parents can do, rather than just limits on what they choose to do. He knelt before her in a moment's silence, somewhat less than he had been just seconds before, and Emy a half step closer to the woman she would one day become.

~ Mark Lawrence

Perhaps I just wanted to know what it was that I wanted. Maybe that is all that growing up means.

~ Mark Lawrence

I've been known to be contrary. When something pushes me, I shove back. Even if the one doing the pushing is me. It would have been easy to gut him then and there. Satisfying. But the need was too urgent. I felt pushed.

~ Mark Lawrence

Assassination is murder with a touch more precision. Brother Sim is precise.

~ Mark Lawrence

All the best secrets are told at night.

~ Mark Lawrence

Still, perhaps that's all lives are, all the world is, a collision of vast conflagrations, each sparked from nothing.

~ Mark Lawrence

Better a long ignoble life of shallow pleasures than a short stab at heroism, ending with a short stab. And just because one man plays another doesn’t always mean that it’s not the right direction for both of them.

~ Mark Lawrence

Never having been troubled by a conscience before, I was far from sure what to expect of one, and so when for a minute or two each day at dawn a voice began to whisper to me to be a better man, I decided the shock of recent events had finally woken mine. My conscience had a name— Baraqel. I didn’t like him much.

~ Mark Lawrence

Battles are all about strategy, and strategy pivots on priorities. Since my priorities were Prince Jalan, Prince Jalan, and Prince Jalan, with “looking good” a distant fourth, I took the opportunity to resume running away. I find that the main thing about success is the ability to act in the moment. A hero attacks in the moment; a good coward runs in it. The rest of the world waits for the next moment and ends up as crow food.

~ Mark Lawrence

It's shame that gets us killed. Shame is the anchor, the heaviest burden to carry from the battlefield. Fortunately shame was an affliction I'd never suffered from.

~ Mark Lawrence

Gomst's mouth framed a 'no', but every other muscle in him said 'yes'. You'd think priests would be better liars, what with their jobs and all.

~ Mark Lawrence

It was a defeat, resorting to crude threats in a game of subtlety, but sometimes one must sacrifice a battle to win the war.

~ Mark Lawrence

Nothing can be cut away. Even the worst of our memories is part of the foundation that keeps us in the world.

~ Mark Lawrence

We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.

~ Mark Lawrence

Those were great big angry men with sharp swords actually wanting to cut pieces off me. It’s not until you’ve seen a red gaping wound and all the complex little bits inside a man all broken up and sliced open, and known that they weren’t ever getting back together again, and vomited your last two meals over the rocks . . . it’s not until then that you understand the business of swords properly and, if you’re a sensible man you vow to have nothing to do with it ever again.

~ Mark Lawrence

I can help you, Jorge. I can give you back your self. I can give you your will.' He held out his hand, palm open. 'Free will has to be taken,' I said.

~ Mark Lawrence

It’s always better to sit on your dignity in private than to stand on it in public.

~ Mark Lawrence

You would think it best to save your breath for running, but I often find screaming helps.

~ Mark Lawrence

Keep still and your troubles find you. I might not have known much about the unborn, but I sure as hell knew about running!

~ Mark Lawrence

A sensible man may fear certain possibilities, but don’t let fear turn possibility into certainty.

~ Mark Lawrence

We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretense of understanding. We paper over the voids of our comprehension with science and religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across the surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us.The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man’s control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.

~ Mark Lawrence