Mark Lawrence Quotes

Let's go to Valhalla with the sun on our faces.

You're a Good Little Slave

Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you'll find an edge to cut you.

We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.

Few things worth having can be got easily.

As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.

Every man has his thorns, not of him, but in him, deep as bones.

When you're in a dark place, and your light is going to run out before too long, you get on with things. It's a wonder to me how few people apply that same logic to their lives.

Some truths should perhaps be left unsaid. Some doors unopened. An angel once told me to let go of the ills I held too close, to let go of the flaws that shaped me.

Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you. Makes you predictable, makes you weak.

A fool may scrawl on a slate and if no one has the wit to wipe it clean for a thousand years, the scrawl becomes the wisdom of ages.

Some pain you can distance yourself from, but a headache sits right where you live.

A strange thing — nails will hold a building together, but there's nothing better for taking a man apart.

There's a road to hell that is paved with good intentions but it's a long route. The quicker path is paved with the kind of ignorance that clever men who just don't want to know are best at.

Four years and everything was the same, except me.

Sometime, It's easier to love someone with flaws you can forgive in return for them forgiving yours.

No half measures. Some things can’t be cut in half. You can’t half-love someone. You can’t half-betray, or half-lie.

It's an irony of our times that men seeking peace must make war.

Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.

It was a defeat, resorting to crude threats in a game of subtlety, but sometimes one must sacrifice a battle to win the war.

Lundist held that a man who can observe is a man apart. Such a man can see opportunities where others see only the obstacles

Take a rest and the world catches up with you. Lesson in life--keep moving.

Confusing the author and the character seems to be a popular and rather unsophisticated reaction to books.

I've always felt that the placement of a man's testicles is an eloquent argument against intelligent design.

A man can reach into anything and turn it to his cause. It's not want, or desire, just certainty. Only be assured that whatever you reach into will reach into you in turn.

Hold to a thing long enough, a secret, a desire, maybe a lie, and it will shape you.

It is purity of spirit that will keep corruption from the flesh

We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off.

You can only win the game when you understand that it is a game. Let a man play chess, and tell him that every pawn is his friend. Let him think both bishops holy. Let him remember happy days in the shadows of his castles. Let him love his queen. Watch him lose them all.

I may be running out of options, but running out isn't an option.

You soon learn there’s no elegance or dignity in death if you spend time in the castle kitchens. You learn how ugly it is, and how good it tastes.

Cowards make the best torturers. Cowards understand fear and they can use it

Some men are too dull to feel what might happen. Others torture themselves with maybes and populate their dreams with horrors more terrible than their worst enemy could inflict upon them.

You can't grow if you're constantly defined by this collection of frozen moments that you keep returning to. And if you can't grow, you're not alive.

All lives are tales. Some spread, and grow in the telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce.

It never pays to walk blindly. Especially not in your own castle where familiarity hides so much - even when we have the eyes to see.

I've always seen 'no' as a challenge rather than an answer.

If you must run, have something to run toward, so it feels less like cowardice.

She'll never love you better than she loves her own children.

There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the [the enemy] had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it.

something in me had got broken, but not so broken I didn't remember what it was.

Do you know why the leaves change colour?... Before a tree sheds a leaf it pumps it full of all the poison it can't rid itself of otherwise. That red there--that's a man's skin blotching with burst veins after an assassin spikes his last meal with roto-weed. The poison spreading through him before he dies.

I think you need to have lived more to truly know a man's heart. You need to have made more transactions in life to know the worth of the coin you spend so freely

Nature shaped the claw to trap, and the tooth to kill, but the thorn...the thorn's only purpose is to hurt.

Most men have at least one redeeming feature. Finding one for Brother Rike requires a stretch. Is 'big' a redeeming feature?

I wanted to go home and if Hell rose up to stop me, it would make me desire it more.

Questions for questions. You're a man who's spent time at court.

Each day the memories weigh a little heavier. Each day they drag you down that bit further. You wind them around you, a single thread at a time, and you weave your own shroud, you build a cocoon, and in it madness grows.

I like mountains, always have done. Big obstinate bits of rock sticking up where they're not wanted and getting in folk's way. Great. Climbing them is a different matter altogether though. I hate that.

I’ll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment.