Quotes from Joe Abercrombie

History is littered with dead good men

But you can't truly hate a man without loving him first, and there's always a trace of that love left over.

It's hard to stay calm when you're terrified, helpless, alone, at the mercy of men with no mercy at all.

You have to be grateful for the small things, when any minute might be your last.

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

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

If life has taught me one thing, it's that there are no villains. Only people, doing their best.

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

Once you've got a task to do, it's better to do it than live with the fear of it.

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

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

You have to realistic about these things.

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.

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

Truly, life is the misery we endure between disappointments.

Every man has his excuses, and the more vile the man becomes, the more touching the story has to be. What is my story now, I wonder?

Sometimes it doesn't matter too much what choice you make, as long as you make it quick and stick to it.

Well. What can we do, except try to do better?

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?

Anyone can face ease and success with confidence. It is the way we face trouble and misfortune that defines us.

People love to see death. It reminds them that however mean, however low, however horrible their lives become… at least they have one.

Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with their world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and their small reasons. It was selfishness and carelessness and waste. It was bad luck, incompetence, and stupidity. It was violence divorced from conscience or consequence. It was high ideals, even, and low methods.

But that was civilisation, so far as Logen could tell. People with nothing better to do, dreaming up ways to make easy things difficult.

You can never have too many knives, his father had told him. Unless they're pointed at you, and by people who don't like you much.