Quotes from Joe Abercrombie

On the battlefield there are no rules.

Strange, to lock men up for thieving when the whole army lived on robbery. To dangle men for murder when they were all at the business of killing. What makes a crime in a time when men take what they please from who they please?

Her knee caught him between the legs with pitiless accuracy, driving the wind from his chest, making him teeter for a breathless moment, then bringing him down like a sledgehammer to a house of cards. As he slid groaning to the carpet in that special, shooting agony that only a blow to the fruits can produce, it was little consolation that he had been right. His Queen was quite evidently a woman of rare and fiery passion.

He's a bloody idiot who knows nothing about anything, but he was born with a cock, so he gets to decide for all of us.

The figurehead goes at the front of the ship. Braves the terror of wind and waves, takes the risks and reaps the glory. But it's an unnoticed fellow hidden away near the back who does the steering." He smiled up towards the head of the column. "No leader worth a damn ever led from the front.

When was it exactly that I became… this? By small degrees, I suppose. One act presses hard 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 one day we look up and find we are… this.

Yarvi soon learned only to sip the results, since unwrapping to piss in that cold was an act of heroism that earned grunted congratulations from the others, all the more heartfelt since everyone knew sooner or later they would have to present their own nethers to the searing wind.

Sand dan Glokta, shield to the helpless. Is it ever too late to be . . . a good man?

He was less and less sure with every day that being a better man was worth all the effort.

You treat folk the way you'd want to be treated, and you can't go far wrong. That's what my father told me. Forgot that advice, for a long time, and I done things I can never make up for. Still, it doesn't hurt to try. My experience? You get what you give, in the end.

Years, back, when they first made him a sergeant, he'd imagined the officers much have all the answers. When he was given his commission, he'd imagined the generals must have all the answers. When King Orso made him a general, he'd imagined the Closed counsel bust have all the answers. Now, as a lord marshal, he finally knew it for an absolute fact. No one had the answers. Worse. There weren't any.

Watching a man's entrails spilling out is excellent entertainment, but the sight of his cock, well, that would be obscene.

You stick a bunch of drunken murderers together, ain't long before some turn to thieving, then to lying, then to bad language, and pretty soon to sobriety, raising families and making an honest living.

A length of wood does not by itself make a man wise, or noble, or powerful, any more than a length of steel does. Power comes from the flesh, my boy, and from the heart, and from the head. From the head most of all.

But I guess you learn to stop hoping, after a while. Life teaches you to expect the worst, eh?

Nothing like being wanted, is there? Wanted by someone you want. Always seems like magic, that something can feel so good but cost nothing.

Just keep in mind what Rudd Threetrees once told me. Let's us get them killed, and not the other way round.' Wonderful grinned. 'Best damn advice about war I ever heard.

Recklessness didn't work out for me in the end." - Sand dan Glokta

I'm not sir, I'm Corporal Tunny.' 'Sorry, Corporal Tunny.' 'Now look. I don't want you here and you don't want to be here—' 'I want to be here,' said Lederlingen. 'You do?' 'Volunteered.' A trace of pride in his voice. 'Vol … un … teered?' Tunny wrestled with the word as if it belonged to a foreign language. 'So they do exist.

Vick learned long ago that might have is a game with no winners. Few games do have winners, in the end.

War's ninety-nine parts boredom and, now and then, one part arse-opening terror. Craw had a powerful sense one of those was about to drop on him from a height.

It was ridiculous the power she had over him. The difference between misery and happiness was the right word from her.

Rejoice in what you have. Power, wealth, fame, they are ghosts! They are like the breeze, impossible to hold. There is no grand destination. Every path ends at the Last Door. Revel in the sparks one person strikes from another.

A bank with a reputation for mercy is like a whore with a reputation for chastity – one fears they won't get the job done.