Top 500 Joe Abercrombie Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “It was what you gave out that made a man, not what you got back.”

— Joe Abercrombie

452. “When you have a load to lift, you’re better lifting than weeping.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

457. “Better to do it, than to live with the fear of it, and so forth.”

— Joe Abercrombie

458. “Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers...”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

462. “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

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. “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

466. “Well.” Glokta looked towards the summer revellers. So near to them, yet somehow in a different world. “I have often said that life is the misery we endure between disappointments.”

— Joe Abercrombie

467. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

469. “Un hombre debe ser capaz de conocer sus propias limitaciones.”

— Joe Abercrombie

470. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

475. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

477. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

483. “Patience is the parent of success.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

485. “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

486. “Absolutes are never to be trusted.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

489. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

491. “Folk want bread,” he said. “Then safety. Then shelter. Freedom’s far down the list, and principles far behind that.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

493. “But love is not always a solution. In this case, it was very much a problem.”

— Joe Abercrombie

494. “The difference between misery and happiness was the right word from her.”

— Joe Abercrombie

495. “You’ll never hold up someone who can’t swim for themselves. In the end, they’ll drag you down with them.”

— Joe Abercrombie

496. “Men don’t fence for their King, or for their families, or for the exercise either, before you try that one on me. They fence for the recognition, for the glory. They fence for their own advancement. They fence for themselves. I should know.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

498. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

500. “But I suppose regrets at least prevent one from repeating the same mistakes.”

— Joe Abercrombie