Quotes from Joe Abercrombie

When you build your life around only one thing, love only one person, dream only one dream, you risk losing everything at a stroke.

Maybe her father hadn't been quite the hero she always reckoned him. Maybe her mother wasn't quite the villain either. Maybe no one's all one or all the other.

How you feeling Forley?' asked the Dogman. 'Bad, but you got to have fear to have courage.

Why give them a proper burning?" Rulf caught the lad by the arm. "Because if we beat beggars here, we're no better than beggars. If we beat great men, we're greater still.

Very little worth anything is ever given away.

The fool strikes, she had said. The wise man smiles, and watches, and learns. Then strikes.

He'd grown himself a little bit of a beard, just under his mouth, while he shaved the rest. Clover couldn't understand it. Grow it or don't, but why leave bits? It was like leaving your wife half-fucked.

They passed lands that had no name, where fens of mirror pools stretched into unknown distances, thousands of fragments of sky sprinkled across this bastard offspring of earth and sea, lonely birds calling out over the desolation, and Yarvi breathed deep the salt chill and longed for home.

The Arch Lector closed his eyes. Crushing news, especially for him, but Orso could have sworn he saw a wry smile at the corner of the old Inquisitor`s mouth. 'Body found floating by the docks,' he murmured.

Strong leaders might like it when someone brings 'em a better idea, but weak ones never do.

If that is your God, I do not believe in Him. What kind of God would He be if your belief could make the slightest difference? Or mine, or anyone's?

Vengeance is a way of clinging to what we have lost. A wedge in the Last Door, and through the crack we can still glimpse the faces of the dead. We strain towards it with all our being, break every rule to have it, but when we clutch it, there is nothing there. Only grief.

Disbelieve this sword, it will still cut you. He is God. We all walk His path regardless

And he realized then that he had not lost all those times in the training square because he lacked the skill, or the strength, or even a hand. He had lacked the will. And somewhere on the South Wind, somewhere in the trackless ice, somewhere in this ancient ruin, he had found it.

Life – the way it really is – is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse' Joseph

Huh. Since we've got all the answers, I sometimes wonder why we follow these bastards." "I hear a lot of talk about loyalty." "Since we've a dozen dead masters between us, and both had a hand in more'n one of the downfalls, I feel no shame in saying that loyalty is overrated.

Every nation was rich in its own way, but poor in the same.

Suffering is what gives a man strength, my boy, just as the steel most hammered turns out the hardest." The old man winced as he squatted down beside Jezal. "Anyone can face ease and success with confidence. It is the way we face trouble and misfortune that defines us.

He flowed up to the first wall, slid one leg over it, silent as a mouse. He lifted himself up, smooth as butter, keeping quiet, keeping low. His back foot caught on a set of loose stones, dragged them scraping with him. He grabbed at them, fumbled them, knocked over even more with his elbow and they clattered down loud around him. He stumbled onto his weak ankle, twisted it, squawked with pain, fell over and rolled through a patch of thistles.

You, that judge men by the handle and the sheath, how can I make you know a good blade?' Jedediah

Men don't fence for their King, or for their families, or for the exercise either, before you try that one on me. They fence for the recognition, for the glory. They fence for their own advancement. They fence for themselves. I should know.

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 that we are . . . this.

Seems giving little men big men's shoes doesn't make 'em big. Just makes 'em trip over.

The Great Leveller,' Dogman whispered to himself, since he was in a thoughtful frame of mind. That's what the hillmen call him. Death, that is. He levels all differences. Named Men and nobodies, south or north. He catches everyone in the end, and he treats each man the same. Seemed