Top 100 Joe Abercrombie Quotes
#1. Half a King is my favorite book by Joe Abercrombie so far, and that's saying something.
Patrick Rothfuss
#2. So you love war. I used to think you were a decent man. But I see now I was mistaken. You're a hero.
Joe Abercrombie
#3. One act presses 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 we look up and find ... this.
Joe Abercrombie
#5. Within reach of his hand, the Bloody-Nine was master. The
Joe Abercrombie
#6. He's really dead?"
Benna blew out his cheeks. "Well, his head's off, and spiked above the gates, so unless you know one hell of a physician ...
Joe Abercrombie
#7. I got into reading a lot of noir and a lot of thrillers as well, and I really admired the plotting about those and the way that they can surprise you. And obviously to surprise people and to have twists in the tale, you have to plan quite carefully.
Joe Abercrombie
#8. He was less and less sure with every day that being a better man was worth all the effort.
Joe Abercrombie
#10. The tree is only as strong as its roots, and knowledge is the root of power.
Joe Abercrombie
#12. Dogman remembered the smell of her hair, the sound of her laugh, the feel of her back, pressed warm and soft against his belly while she slept. Well-used memories, picked over and worn thin like a favourite shirt.
Joe Abercrombie
#14. Folk aren't just cowards or heroes. They're both and neither, depending on how things stand. Depending on who stands with them, who stands against. Depending on the life they've had. The death they see waiting. They
Joe Abercrombie
#15. Of all things, men most love to watch ohers face Death. It reminds them they yet live.
Joe Abercrombie
#16. You were a hero round these parts. That's what they call you when you kill so many people the word murderer falls short.
Joe Abercrombie
#17. Never took an easy path if he thought it was the wrong one. Never stepped back from a fight if he thought it had to be done.
Joe Abercrombie
#18. Sometimes great rights must be stitched from little wrongs.
Joe Abercrombie
#19. He thinks before he speaks, then says no more than he has to.
Joe Abercrombie
#20. If you believe that I chose any part of the pitiful shadow of a life you see before you, you are very much mistaken. I chose glory and success. The box did not contain what was written on the lid." "The
Joe Abercrombie
#21. You have to be grateful for the small things, when any minute might be your last.
Joe Abercrombie
#22. Great events, but it all seemed of small importance compared to what happened now, in this room. Who knew? The course of his life might turn on the next few moments if he could find the right words, and make himself say them.
Joe Abercrombie
#23. That was the trouble with pride, and courage, and all those clench-jawed virtues bards love to harp on. The more you have, the more likely you are to end up bottom in a pile of dead men.
Joe Abercrombie
#24. Conscience can be painful but so can the cock-rot. A grown-up should suffer his afflictions privately and not allow them to become an inconvenience for friends and colleagues.' - The Magnificent Nicomo Cosca
Joe Abercrombie
#25. That's what an idiot does when he gets angry. He destroys whatever's nearest, even if it's his own house!
Joe Abercrombie
#26. Where d'you get the knife?" He wished he had one.
"He gave it to me." There was a crumpled shape in the shadows by the wall, the matting all around soaked with dark blood. "This way.
Joe Abercrombie
#27. Have a smile for breakfast, you'll be shitting joy by lunch.
Joe Abercrombie
#28. If you wanted to see my cock that badly, you could just have asked.'
'No doubt a thing o' haunting beauty but i came for something else.
Joe Abercrombie
#29. We are leaders. War is what happens when we fail. Or are pushed into failure by the rash and the foolish. Victory is better than defeat, but ... not by much.
Joe Abercrombie
#31. Rare luck. Perhaps Shadikshirram couldn't convince the Banyas to follow us.
Joe Abercrombie
#32. exceeded every expectation. It was built on a wide promontory that
Joe Abercrombie
#33. First it is done to us, then we do it to others, then we order it done. Such is the way of things
Joe Abercrombie
#34. No one cares about the past any more," he whispered. "They don't see that you can't have a future without a past.
Joe Abercrombie
#35. 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.
Joe Abercrombie
#36. This was a place of learning, and wonder, and great beauty.'
'Time has not been kind to the place.'
'Time is never kind.
Joe Abercrombie
#38. Now go, and if I hear of more fighting, let it be of how the two of you beat someone else together.
Joe Abercrombie
#39. Different men have different ways, Logen had told him once, and you have to have fear to have courage.
Joe Abercrombie
#40. But it is easy to speak of the past, impossible to go there. I am powerful in ways you can only dream, yet I am still a prisoner of what I have done. I can never escape the cell I have made for myself. Things are what they are.
Joe Abercrombie
#41. I used to love to hear stories of that man's exploits! One of my heroes, when I was young. Riding round the enemy, harassing his lines of communication, falling on the baggage train and whatnot.
The Prince's riding crop rode around, harassed, and fell on imaginary baggage in the air before him.
Joe Abercrombie
#42. When you're in hell, only a devil can point the way out.
Joe Abercrombie
#43. I'd hate to be lost. But prepare yourself for the possibility of disappointment. Life is full of them. And the manner of its endings is often the greatest one of all.
Joe Abercrombie
#44. What is the world coming to when an honest man cannot burn corpses without suspicion? asked Nothing.
Joe Abercrombie
#45. In violent times folk like to kneel to violent men. In peaceful times they remember they're happier standing.
Joe Abercrombie
#46. Gold and silver is everything to everyone. Some of us have enough of it to pretend otherwise.
Joe Abercrombie
#47. Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit. He
Joe Abercrombie
#48. Magic is the art and science of forcing things to behave in ways that are not in their nature.
Joe Abercrombie
#49. Sometimes, when someone lives in danger for too long, the only time they feel alive is when death's breathing on their shoulder.
Joe Abercrombie
#50. Knowledge is so often the antidote to fear. But not here. Not now.
Joe Abercrombie
#51. Rules are for children. This is war, and in war the only crime is to lose.
Joe Abercrombie
#52. -'Would it help if I said I was very drunk?'
Brachio shook his head. - 'We all were'
-'Shitty childhood?'
-'Mummy used to leave me in a cupboard.'
-'Shitty adulthood?'
-'Whose isn't?
Joe Abercrombie
#53. What better foundation for an alliance than mutual hatred and suspicion?
Joe Abercrombie
#54. It's hard to be done a favor by a man you hate. It's hard to hate him so much afterwards. Losing an enemy can be worse than losing a friend, if you've had him for long enough.
Joe Abercrombie
#56. Give Yarvi the knife since he has just one hand to hold it. One hand, perhaps, but the blood of kings in his veins!"
"It's keeping it there that worries me," said Yarvi under his breath.
Joe Abercrombie
#57. When he'd made it thirty strides or so Logen turned around and looked back. The pot was sitting forlorn by the lake, already filling up with rainwater. They'd been through a lot together, him and that pot. "Fare you well, old friend." The pot did not reply.
Joe Abercrombie
#58. There was no such thing as luck. Luck was a word idiots used to explain the consequences of their own rashness, and selfishness, and stupidity. More often than not bad luck meant bad plans.
Joe Abercrombie
#59. It's what you give out that makes a man, not what you get back.
Joe Abercrombie
#60. You are lucky, Thorn. You are very lucky."
"Doubtless. Not every girl gets to be stabbed through the face."
"And by a duke of royal blood too!
Joe Abercrombie
#61. It always amazes me, how swiftly problems can be solved, once you start cutting things off people.
Joe Abercrombie
#62. Somewhere in the shadows a clock vomited up a few sluggish chimes.
Joe Abercrombie
#63. Friends are people one pretends to like in order to make life bearable.
Joe Abercrombie
#64. Strange, how quickly a king could become an animal. Or half a king half an animal. Perhaps even those we raise highest never get that far above the mud.
Joe Abercrombie
#65. The universal law is that the most frustrating thing will always happen, no matter how unlikely.
Joe Abercrombie
#66. Treat a man like a dog and sooner or later he'll bite you,
Joe Abercrombie
#67. When life is a cell, there is nothing more liberating than captivity.
Joe Abercrombie
#68. He would have liked to weigh his choices, but for that you need more than one.
Joe Abercrombie
#70. It is easy to speak of the past, impossible to go there.
Joe Abercrombie
#71. She shrugged. "I fell. I'm a clumsy fool." "I know how you feel. I'm such a fool I knocked half my teeth out and hacked my leg to useless pulp. Look at me now, a cripple. It's amazing where a little foolishness can take you, if it goes unchecked.
Joe Abercrombie
#73. The ground must be a general's best friend, or it becomes his worst enemy.
Joe Abercrombie
#74. A few words can be more effective than a lot of blades, even in such times as these.
Joe Abercrombie
#75. The trouble with running is wherever you run to, there you are.
Joe Abercrombie
#76. He had learned long ago that life became much easier if you ignored what was not right before you.
Joe Abercrombie
#77. The elves knew the true names of these rivers,' said Skifr, who'd made a kind of bed among the cargo to drape herself on. 'We call them Divine and Denied because those are as close as our clumsy human tongues can come.
Joe Abercrombie
#78. Better to have steel to hand and find no trouble than find yourself in trouble with no steel to hand.
Joe Abercrombie
#79. An open mind is like to an open wound,' growled Glokta. 'Vulnerable to poison.
Joe Abercrombie
#80. You are a gentleman, sir,' muttered Cosca. 'I am a murderer.' 'I see no reason why a man cannot be both . . .
Joe Abercrombie
#81. Always more enemies, and fewer friends. Blood gets you nothing but more blood.
Joe Abercrombie
#82. Death waits for us all. Nothing's forever. Life's about making the best of what you find along the way. A man who's not content with what he's got, well, more than likely he won't be content with what he hasn't.
Joe Abercrombie
#83. Some men are made for doing violence. Some are meant for planning it. Then there are a special few whose talent is for taking the credit.
Joe Abercrombie
#84. Some men you stick to right off. But it's those that take time to stick that stick longest.
Joe Abercrombie
#85. Mason had just pulled his own knife out, a monster of a thing you could've called a sword without much fear of correction.
Joe Abercrombie
#86. Strange, that however tough one's skin becomes in later life, the wounds of youth never close. Shenkt
Joe Abercrombie
#87. I know you're a great fencer, but I've been told your wit is even sharper than your sword. So much so in fact, that you only use your sword upon your friends, as your wit is far too deadly.
Joe Abercrombie
#88. Knives,' muttered Calder, 'and threats, and bribes, and war?'
Bayaz' eyes shone with the lamplight. 'Yes?'
'What kind of a fucking wizard are you?'
'The kind you obey.
Joe Abercrombie
#90. Magnificent,' muttered Glokta, stretching out his aching back and squinting up, the pure white stone almost painful to look at in the afternoon glare. 'Seeing this, one could almost believe in God.' If one didn't know better.
Joe Abercrombie
#91. An open mind is like to an open wound. Vulnerable to poison. Liable to fester. Apt to give its owner only pain.
Joe Abercrombie
#92. You can weep over each other's hidden nobility when we're safe!
Joe Abercrombie
#93. A man with a missing eye after a man with a missing finger. There's a song in there somewhere, I reckon.
Joe Abercrombie
#94. I never saw men act with such ignorance, violence and self-serving malice as when energised by a just cause.
Joe Abercrombie
#95. Suffering is what gives a man strength, my boy, just as the steel most hammered turns out the hardest.
Joe Abercrombie
#96. That's the trouble with running. Wherever you run to, that's where you are.
Joe Abercrombie
#97. Patience is as fearsome a weapon as rage. More so, in fact, 'cause fewer men have it.
Joe Abercrombie
#98. I'm a fucking coward."
"Maybe." Craw jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Whirrun's corpse. "There's a hero. Tell me who's better off.
Joe Abercrombie
#99. Those with bad luck should at least attempt to balance it with good sense.
Joe Abercrombie
#100. 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.
Joe Abercrombie
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