Quotes from Joe Abercrombie

You put a mask on a person, something weird happens. Changes the way they act along with the way they look. Sometimes they don't seem like people at all no more, but something else.

Seemed being a better man might be harder work than he'd thought.

Once the killing starts, it rarely sticks to those who deserve it

What use are straight answers in a crooked world?

It's worth giving your enemies a chance. They know they can't expect one and might be thankful for it." Rikke frowned sideways. "Friends are much harder to please.

A man in charge can't have men putting questions. Just can't have it. They come with questions first, then they come with knives.

I wouldn't trust his corpse to stop an arrow.

It may be a union in name, but they fight each other tooth and nail. The lowly squabble over trifles. The great wage secret wars for power and wealth, and they call it government. Wars of words, and tricks, and guile, but no less bloody for that. The casualties are many.

a man who doesn't keep his word isn't much of a man at all.

Broad kept sweeping. He'd learned in Styria there's a lot of things that are better not thought about. Couldn't be a coincidence that the happiest men Broad had ever known were generally the stupidest.

Misjudgement is as much a part of life as unhappiness. It is nice to hold the power and make the choices for everyone. But the risk of making any choice is always that you might make the wrong one. We must make our choices nonetheless. Fear of being a grown-up is a poor reason to remain a child.

Have a smile at breakfast," droned Shivers, stony-faced, "you'll be shitting joy by lunch.

Strange, that however tough one's skin becomes in later life, the wounds of youth never close.

Honour, eh? What the hell is that anyway? Every man thinks it's something different. You can't drink it. You can't fuck it. The more of it you have the less good it does you, and if you've got none at all you don't miss it.' He shook his head. 'But some men think it's the best thing in the world.

Someone who'd starved in the camps, who'd lied her way into the hearts and beds of good people, who'd tricked and tortured to betray a cause she halfway believed in for the sake of one she didn't at all, might've felt a little bitter at seeing all this money wasted.

In the songs, Angulf Clovenfoot's Gettlanders fell upon the Vanstermen like hawks from an evening sky. Master Hunnan's misfits fell on Rissentoft like a herd of sheep down a steep flight of steps.

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.

Jezal was beginning to doubt that anyone in a position of high authority ever really knew what they were doing. The best one could hope for was to maintain some shred of an illusion that one might.

Your trouble is, you've got yourself an idea about how life should be, but it's just not how life IS.

and swore to herself that if she lived out the week, she'd make it her business to see Stour Nightfall fucked by a pig.

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

being a parent … there is no plan. It's just a set of mistakes you hardly notice making.

I may be no kind of fisher, but I've always had a talent for making men bleed. Best put that stick down before I make you fucking eat it.

On the right side of history, maybe. Vick snorted. The thing about history is you don't know what the right side is till long afterwards, and by then it hardly matters. That's the sort o' thing you hear from folk who know they're on the wrong side.