Top 500 Joe Abercrombie Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Always the ones quickest to insults got the thinnest skin, for some reason.”

— Joe Abercrombie

452. “Because the vast majority of men would far rather be told what to do than make their own choices. Obedience is easy.”

— Joe Abercrombie

453. “Help with strange problems comes from strange people.”

— Joe Abercrombie

454. “One of my greatest pleasures is a good cut of meat, and the bloodier the better. Just show them the flame, I always tell my cook. Just show it to them.”

— Joe Abercrombie

455. “Fighting every fight you’re offered doesn’t make you a big man, it makes you a fool.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

457. “You killed him all to bits, and robbed everyone who knew him, and cut all the good he might ever do out of the world.”

— Joe Abercrombie

458. “History is not the story of battles between right and wrong, but between one man’s right and another’s. Evil is not the opposite of good. It is what we call another man’s notion of good when it differs from ours.”

— Joe Abercrombie

459. “Never trust a man beyond his own interests.”

— Joe Abercrombie

460. “What do we leave behind but things not done, not said, not finished? Empty clothes, empty rooms, empty spaces in the ones who knew us? Mistakes never made right and hopes rotted down to nothing?”

— Joe Abercrombie

461. “Hard words are for fools and cowards. Calder might have been both, but Logen was neither. If you mean to kill, you’re better getting right to it than talking about it. Talk only makes the other man ready, and that’s the last thing you want.”

— Joe Abercrombie

462. “Her mother had always warned her a man is judged by his best moment, a woman by her worst.”

— Joe Abercrombie

463. “Wine can keep a happy man happy, on occasion. A sad one it always makes worse.”

— Joe Abercrombie

464. “And loyalty? A trick those with power played on those without to make them act against their own interests.”

— Joe Abercrombie

465. “He remembered other times and other campfires, when he had not been alone.”

— Joe Abercrombie

466. “You must make of your quim a stone.”

— Joe Abercrombie

467. “Winning teaches you nothing,” said Tunny. “You see what a man really is when he loses.”

— Joe Abercrombie

468. “Every nation was rich in its own way, but poor in the same.”

— Joe Abercrombie

469. “Principles are like clothes,’ said Vick, straightening her jacket. ‘You have to change them to suit the audience.”

— Joe Abercrombie

470. “Some people, Orso supposed, can never forgive being forgiven.”

— Joe Abercrombie

471. “Surprise makes brave men cowards, strong men weak, wise men fools.”

— Joe Abercrombie

472. “It’s a rare man who’s made better by a bit of power.”

— Joe Abercrombie

473. “But then it’s difficult, isn’t it, to make a passionate argument for what you already have? So boring. Whereas the delightful alternative? A bouquet of promises! A sackful of dreams! A glorious ship of fantasies, undamaged by collision with actually getting anything done.”

— Joe Abercrombie

474. “I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes.’ Cosca stretched his chin up and scratched at his scabby neck. ‘The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.”

— Joe Abercrombie

475. “Knowledge isn’t always a gift, d’you see? Sometimes it’s better we be swaddled in the comforting darkness of ignorance.”

— Joe Abercrombie

476. “A good liar tells as much truth as he can. That way you never know what you’re getting.”

— Joe Abercrombie

477. “Unity and respect, it seemed, were only for those who did as they were told.”

— Joe Abercrombie

478. “Doubts and regrets, Isern. They’re the cost of casting a shadow.”

— Joe Abercrombie

479. “If anyone had asked him, Clover would’ve said there was less than no chance this’d be settled with talk. But you never realise how much hope you’re holding till it gets knifed and thrown off a roof.”

— Joe Abercrombie

480. “When you build your life around only one thing, love only one person, dream only one dream, you risk losing everything at a stroke.”

— Joe Abercrombie

481. “Faith must be shaken from time to time, or it becomes rigid. An excuse for any outrage. I have come to believe that the righteous... should always have doubts.”

— Joe Abercrombie

482. “Reassuring lies had always been the glue that held his family together, after all.”

— Joe Abercrombie

483. “There’s no curse like getting what you want.”

— Joe Abercrombie

484. “If you build your boat from cheese, d’you see, you can’t wail at the heavens when it sinks, for cheese is known to be a poor material for boat-building.”

— Joe Abercrombie

485. “Votes? Elections? The voice of the common man? I hope you aired the suitable level of contempt. Power for the people? They don’t want it. They don’t understand it. What the hell would they do with it if they had it? The people are like children. They are children. They need someone to tell them what to do.”

— Joe Abercrombie

486. “Nothing is ever fixed. From the moment it is born, from the moment it is built, everything is always dying, decaying, drifting into chaos.”

— Joe Abercrombie

487. “I saw two Northmen. One was reading a book.’ ‘Really? A book?’ Friendly shrugged. ‘There are readers everywhere.”

— Joe Abercrombie

488. “Maybe’s a game with no winners.”

— Joe Abercrombie

489. “It can be a terrible curse for a man to get everything he ever dreamed of. If the shining prizes turn out somehow to be empty baubles, he is left without even his dreams for comfort. All the things that Jezal had thought he wanted – power, fame, the beautiful trappings of greatness – they were nothing but dust. All he wanted now was for things to be as they had been, before he got them. But there was no way back. Not ever.”

— Joe Abercrombie

490. “The ground must be a general’s best friend, or it becomes his worst enemy.”

— Joe Abercrombie

491. “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

492. “A throwaway conversation, a couple of bad jokes that half the gathering of five could not even have understood, and it was done. The battle was over. The war was over. Could they have had that conversation at the start, and would all those men–all these men–still be alive? Still have their arms, or legs? However she turned it around, she could not make it fit.”

— Joe Abercrombie

493. “Well-used memories, picked over and worn thin like a favourite shirt.”

— Joe Abercrombie

494. “His recklessness or her ambition alone could not have done it. But like two chemicals which, apart, are merely mildly poisonous, combined they had produced an unstable explosive which had blown both their lives and thousands of others to hell.”

— Joe Abercrombie

495. “Patience is the parent of success.”

— Joe Abercrombie

496. “He frowned over at a set of great pots, man high, fires banked underneath ’em, steam pouring from inside. “What the bloody hell are the pots for?” asked Scenn. “Soup or something?” “They’re for rendering down the corpses, d’you see.” Isern frowned at her spear’s bloody head. “So they can get at the bones.” Scenn shook his head in disbelief. “What a pack of arseholes.”

— Joe Abercrombie

497. “Pike had taught them a lesson – if enough people got angry enough, they could change things. Now anger was the answer to everything.”

— Joe Abercrombie

498. “Absolutes are never to be trusted.”

— Joe Abercrombie

499. “Why don’t you got a man, Shy?’ ‘Don’t like men much, I guess.’ ‘You don’t like anyone much.’ ‘They started it.’ ‘All of ’em?’ ‘Enough of ’em.”

— Joe Abercrombie

500. “Vengeance is just an empty chest you choose to carry.”

— Joe Abercrombie