Joe Abercrombie Quotes

Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.

— Joe Abercrombie

“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

When you're in hell, only a devil can point the way out.

— Joe Abercrombie

“Suffering is what gives a man strength, my boy, just as the steel most hammered turns out the hardest.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“Strange, isn't it,' mused Glokta as he watched him struggle for air. 'Big men, small men, thin men, fat men, clever men, stupid men, they all respond the same to a fist in the guts. One minute you think you're the most powerful man in the world. The next you can't even breathe by yourself.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“Shivers heaved out a sigh. "Just trying to make tomorrow that bit better than today is all. I'm one of those ... you've got a word for it, don't you?"
"Idiots?"
He looked sideways at her. "It was a different one I had in mind."
"Optimists."
"That's the one. I'm an optimist."
"How's it working out for you?"
"Not great, but I keep hoping."
"That's optimists. You bastards never learn.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say he's a lover.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“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

Have you no pity?' Glokta could only shrug. 'I did have. As a boy I was soft-hearted beyond the point of foolishness. I swear, I would cry at a fly caught in a spider's web.' He grimaced at a brutal spasm through his leg as he turned for the door. 'Constant pain has cured me of that.

— Joe Abercrombie

“What a place. Glokta stifled a smile. It reminds me of myself, in a way. We both were magnificent once, and we both have our best days far behind us.”

— Joe Abercrombie

Body found floating by the docks ...

— Joe Abercrombie

“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

“What's the difference? Fill a hundred pits with dead Northmen, congratulations, have a parade! Kill one man in the same uniform as you? A crime. A murder. Worse than despicable. Are we not all men? All blood and bone and dreams?”

— Joe Abercrombie

One day you're something, so promising and full o' dares, so big the world's too small a place to hold you. Then, 'fore you know it, you're old, and you realise all them things you had in mind you'll never get to. All them doors you felt too big to fit through have already shut. Only one left open and it leads to nothing but nothing.

— Joe Abercrombie

The tongueless torturer and the flower of chivalry. An unlikely alliance.

— Joe Abercrombie

“Shy South comes home to her farm to find a blackened shell, her brother and sister stolen, and knows she'll have to go back to bad old ways if she's ever to see them again. She sets off in pursuit with only her cowardly old step-father Lamb for company. But it turns out he's hiding a bloody past of his own. None bloodier. Their journey will take them across the lawless plains, to a frontier town gripped by gold fever, through feuds, duels, and massacres, high into unmapped mountains to a reckoning with ancient enemies, and force them into alliance with Nicomo Cosca, infamous soldier of fortune, a man no one should ever have to trust ...”

— Joe Abercrombie

“An Army is an instrument of government. It must be used in such a way that it furthers the interests of government. Otherwise what use is it? Only an extremely costly machine for ... minting medals.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“Inquisitor Lorsen's thin lip curled. "There is truly nothing in you of what separates man from animal, is there? You are bereft of conscience. An utter absence of morality. You have no principle beyond the selfish."
Cosca's face hardened as he leaned forwards. "Perhaps when you have faced as many disappointments and suffered as many betrayals as I, you will see it - there is no principle beyond the selfish, Inquisitor, and men are animals. Conscience is a burden we choose to bear. Morality is the lie we tell ourselves to make its bearing easier. There have been many times in my life when I have wished it was not so. But it is so.”

— Joe Abercrombie

The trouble with being able to lift heavy things is that when heavy things need lifting folk step out of the way and smile at you.

— Joe Abercrombie

“Better to have steel to hand and find no trouble than find yourself in trouble with no steel to hand.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“It was what you gave out that made a man, not what you got back.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“There is a time for wondering what a man wants," said Fror, no fear at all in his. "And there is a time for splitting his head. This is that second time.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“You keep an oath not for the oath but for yourself”

— Joe Abercrombie

“Water dripping from his slapping fruits”

— Joe Abercrombie

Young love is a treasure truly wasted on the young,

— Joe Abercrombie

“That was an age of great men doing what was right ... This is an age of little men doing what they must.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“A lot of wasted time, to the Dogman's mind, but once you've been fool enough to ask for a task, you better do the one you're given.n”

— Joe Abercrombie

“To the starving man, bread is beautiful. To the homeless man, a roof is beautiful. To the drunkard, wine is beautiful. Only those who want for nothing else need find beauty in a lump of rock. Stolicus”

— Joe Abercrombie

“The older you get, the more swiftly the years pass. It's easy to forget how quickly people die.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“The giant's blue left arm uncoiled from the Bloody-Nine's body, his blue hand seized hold of the Bloody-Nine's wrist, but there could be no stopping it. When the sapling seed finds a crack in the mountain, over long years its deep roots will burst the very rock apart. So the Bloody-Nine strained with every muscle and let the slow time pass, hissing out his hatred into the Feared's twitching mouth. The blade crept onwards, slowly, slowly, and its very point bit into painted flesh, just below the giant's bottom rib.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“A man so slimy he would have found employment as axle grease.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“You keep your guard too low, I am afraid. You are full of passion, but passion without discipline is no more than a child's tantrum.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“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

“All heroes' news, like something from the songs, but there's nothing like others' successes to make your own failures sting the worse.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“Shock and surprise, my little beauties, and quickness to strike, and lack of pity. These are the things that make a killer.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“Helping people was always a mistake ...
Trust was a word for fools. It was a word people used when they meant to betray you.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“Strong leaders might like it when someone brings 'em a better idea. But weak ones never do.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“The general with the smallest numbers should remain always on the offensive.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“Sometimes great rights must be stitched from little wrongs.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“A man who doesn't want opinions should keep his own mouth shut.”

— Joe Abercrombie

He could do anything and it would be right, for he had made himself a willing puppet of God's purpose and in so doing freed himself. He alone free, surrounded by slaves.

— Joe Abercrombie

“To draw from the world below is fraught with peril. The Magus”

— Joe Abercrombie

“Damn painted savage stabs himself on the floor of the Open Council, challengess us before the King, and nothing is done! Government by committee! Everyone pulling their own way! You can only react, never prepare!”

— Joe Abercrombie

“A man with a missing eye after a man with a missing finger. There's a song in there somewhere, I reckon.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“You are aware, I suppose, that I lived through two years of torture? Two years in hell, so I can stand before you now. Or lean before you, twisted as an old tree root. A crippled, shambling, wretched mockery of a man, eh, Lord Hoff? Let us be honest with one another. Sometimes I lose control of my own leg. My own eyes. My own face." He snorted. "If you can call it a face. My bowels, too, are rebellious. I often wake up daubed in my own shit. I find myself in constant pain, and the memories of everything that I have lost nag at me, endlessly." He felt his left eye twitching. Let it twitch. "So you can see how, despite my constant efforts to be a man of sunny temper, I find that I despise the world, and everything in it, and myself most of all. A regrettable state of affairs, for which there is no remedy.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“You got no one, then?' she asked.
'No one but enemies.'
'Why aren't you fighting them?'
'Fighting? It's got me everything I have.' And he held his big empty hands up to show her. 'Nothing but an evil reputation and an awful lot of men with a burning need to kill me. Fighting? Hah! The better you are at it, the worse off it leaves you. I've settled some scores, and that can feel grand, but the feeling don't last long. Vengeance won't keep you warm nights, and that's a fact. Overrated. Won't do on its own. You need something else.'
Ferro shook her head. 'You expect too much out of life, pink.'
He grinned. 'And here was me thinking you expect too little.'
'Expect nothing and you won't be disappointed.'
'Expect nothing and you'll get nothing.'
Ferro scowled at him. That was the thing about talk. Somehow it always took her where she did not want to go. Lack of practice, maybe.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“Dimbik had once been told that the best soldiers are rarely courageous. That was when he had been sure it was the career for him. He started to slide one hand towards his sword, far from sure what he would do with it once it reached the hilt.”

— Joe Abercrombie

Never to want for anything, or work for anything, or show the tiniest grain of self-discipline in a whole life must give a man a strange outlook on the world,

— Joe Abercrombie

“When the fighting is over you dig, if you're still alive. You dig graves for your dead comrades, A last mark of respect, however little you might have had for them. You dig as deep as you can bothered, you dump then in, you cover them up, they rot away and are forgotten. That's the way it's always been.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“God of the battlefield, eh? Gods and devils can look much alike to us little people. You went to a ford, and a bridge, and a hill, and what did you do there except kill? What have you made? Who have you helped?" He stood there for a moment, all his bravado slithering out. She is right. And no one knows it better than me. "Nothing and no one," he whispered. "So you love war. I used to think you were a decent man. But I see now I was mistaken." She stabbed at his chest with her forefinger. "You're a hero.”

— Joe Abercrombie