Quotes from Joe Abercrombie

You trust her?" asked Forest. "No," said Leo. "But trust is a poor foundation for an alliance.

Perhaps that was the moment you grew up, when you learned your parents were just as fallible as everyone else.

You've an excellent eye. They're shit. But that's how you know what a truly great teacher I am. Any fool can get results from the gifted.

Bad men are a terrible curse, no doubt, right up until you're in bad trouble and there's one on your side. Then they're the best thing ever.

That's the most wounding betrayal of all. The one by your own flesh. Live long enough, you see everything ruined.

There is a time for wondering what a man wants, and there is a time for splitting his head. This is that second time.

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

No plan survives contact with the enemy." Helmuth von Moltke

There was no magic to it. She simply listened, observed, and made sure she never spoke until she knew what she was speaking of. Knowledge is the root of power, after all.

My curse on fucking causes! Nothing but big excuses. I never saw men act with such ignorance, violence and self-serving malice as when energised by a just cause.

War is terrible, isn't it?' 'It blights the landscape, throttles commerce and industry, kills the innocent and rewards the guilty, thrusts honest men into poverty and lines the pockets of profiteers, and in the end produces nothing but corpses, monuments and tall tales.

Trust. It was a word that only liars used. A word the truthful has no need of.

a purse that never emptied.

Ah yes! I had the chance to leave all this behind. Yet I chose to come back. Change is not a simple thing, eh, Sergeant? I entirely see and understand the pointlessness and waste of it all, yet I do it anyways. Does that make me worse or better than the man who does it thinking himself ennobled by a righteous cause? Or the man who does it for his own profit, without the slightest grain of thought for right or wrong? Or are we all the same?

But then getting warriors to fight has always been easy. It's stopping the bastards that's the tougher trick.

If you say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, and one thing only, say he's a killer.

My father always used to say, you want things right, you have to put 'em right yourself.

His lips were split and bloody, his sides covered in darkening bruises, his head lolled sideways, face swollen almost past recognition. In short, he looks like a man ready to confess.

There's only one kind of good news, and that's dead enemies.

Ése es el problema que tiene la gente que dispone de un buen par de piernas, que siempre van corriendo a todas partes.

The more you kill, the more you get better at it. And the better you get at killing, the less use you are for anything else.

Jaud planted his fists on his hips. "You made it, then." "Some turds float," said Rulf. Ankran

I know you like to think you're jolting about helpless in a runaway cart, carried off to who-knows-where with no say in the matter, but if you look down, you might see you're holding the reins.

You must be fucking joking.