Top 500 Joe Abercrombie Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Trust. It was a word that only liars used. A word the truthful had no need of.”

— Joe Abercrombie

102. “A choice between killing and dying is no choice at all. You have to be realistic about these things. b.”

— Joe Abercrombie

103. “Pardon me,” said Glokta, wiping his running eye with a finger, “but I spent two years in the Emperor’s prisons. I daresay, if I had known I’d be there half that long at the start, I would have made a more concerted effort to kill myself. Seven hundred days, give or take, in the darkness. As close to hell, I would have thought, as a living man can go. My point is this – if you mean to upset me, you’ll need more than harsh language.”

— Joe Abercrombie

104. “Mercy and cowardice are the same,” she snapped out. “But you want their land, not their lives, no? Dead men can’t obey.”

— Joe Abercrombie

105. “I’m no drunk,” croaked Cosca. “I simply like the taste of wine. So much so that I have to drink some every few hours or become violently ill.” He clung to his fork while the room swayed around him, fixed his aching smile while they chuckled away. He hoped they enjoyed their laughter while they could, because Nicomo Cosca always laughed last. Provided he wasn’t being sick, of course.”

— Joe Abercrombie

106. “Walk in God’s footsteps, Ferro Maljinn.” “Huh. They have no God here.” “Say rather that they have many.” “Many?” “Had you not noticed? Here, each man worships himself.”

— Joe Abercrombie

107. “A great leader must share the hardships of his followers, of his soldiers, of his subjects. That is how he wins their respect. Great leaders do not complain. Not ever.”

— Joe Abercrombie

108. “Take everything as a compliment, you can never be insulted.”

— Joe Abercrombie

109. “Suffering is what gives a man strength, my boy, just as the steel most hammered turns out the hardest.” The old man winced as he squatted down beside Jezal. “Anyone can face ease and success with confidence. It is the way we face trouble and misfortune that defines us.”

— Joe Abercrombie

110. “The mistakes of old,” intoned Bayaz with the highest pomposity, “should be made only once. Any worthwhile education, therefore, must be founded on a sound understanding of history.”

— Joe Abercrombie

111. “They say you can see all the beauty in the world in the way a hanged man swings.”

— Joe Abercrombie

112. “The world is a grey place. A place of half-truths. Of half-wrongs and half-rights. Yet there are things worth fighting for, and they must be pursued with all our vigour and commitment. Half-measures achieve nothing.’ ‘What.”

— Joe Abercrombie

113. “Great men have great faults.”

— Joe Abercrombie

114. “You treat folk the way you’d want to be treated, and you can’t go far wrong. That’s what my father told me. Forgot that advice, for a long time, and I done things I can never make up for. Still, it doesn’t hurt to try. My experience? You get what you give, in the end.”

— Joe Abercrombie

115. “When was it exactly that I became... this? By small degrees, I suppose. One act presses hard 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 one day we look up and fine we are... this.”

— Joe Abercrombie

116. “Glokta felt his hand bunching into a fist on the parapet. ‘We must make the Gurkish pay for every stride of ground.’ We must make them pay for my ruined leg. ‘For every inch of dirt.’ For my missing teeth. ‘For every meagre shack, and crumbling hut, and worthless stretch of dust.’ For my weeping eye, and my twisted back, and my repulsive shadow of a life. He licked at his empty gums. ‘Make them pay.”

— Joe Abercrombie

117. “Vengeance only walks a circle. From blood, back to blood. Death waits for us all. You can follow your path to her bent under a burden of rage. I did, for many years. You can let it poison you.” He took a long breath, and let it sigh away. “Or you can let it go.”

— Joe Abercrombie

118. “Give me only evil men for friends, Verturio wrote. Them I understand.”

— Joe Abercrombie

119. “You can’t change the fact the world’s full of arseholes. You can only change how you deal with them.”

— Joe Abercrombie

120. “You don’t pick your family, you take what you’re given and you make the best of it.”

— Joe Abercrombie

121. “As for being a good man,’ and Glokta curled his lip, ’that ship sailed long ago, and I wasn’t even there to wave it off.”

— Joe Abercrombie

122. “Danger and opportunity often walk hand in hand.”

— Joe Abercrombie

123. “The figurehead goes at the front of the ship. Braves the terror of wind and waves, takes the risks and reaps the glory. But it’s an unnoticed fellow hidden away near the back who does the steering.” He smiled up towards the head of the column. “No leader worth a damn ever led from the front.”

— Joe Abercrombie

124. “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

125. “Those with bad luck should at least attempt to balance it with good sense.”

— Joe Abercrombie

126. “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.’ ‘Conscience and the cock-rot are hardly equivalent,’ snapped Lorsen. ‘Indeed,’ said Cosca, significantly. ‘The cock-rot is rarely fatal.”

— Joe Abercrombie

127. “Every hero is someone’s villain.”

— Joe Abercrombie

128. “King Uthil says steel is the answer. I say his sight is short. Dust is the last answer to every question, now and always.”

— Joe Abercrombie

129. “All the great heroes of old, you know – the great kings, the great generals – they all faced adversity from time to time.” Jezal looked up. He had almost forgotten that Bayaz was there. “Suffering is what gives a man strength, my boy, just as the steel most hammered turns out the hardest.”

— Joe Abercrombie

130. “Guilt is a luxury reserved for those still breathing and with no unbearable pain, cold or hunger demanding all their fickle attention.”

— Joe Abercrombie

131. “Magic is the art and science of forcing things to behave in ways that are not in their nature.”

— Joe Abercrombie

132. “Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter.”

— Joe Abercrombie

133. “But the risk of making any choice is always that you might make the wrong one. We must make our choices nonetheless. Fear of being a grown-up is a poor reason to remain a child.”

— Joe Abercrombie

134. “Perhaps we’ll have some answers, at least, before the end. I always dreamed of dying well-informed.”

— Joe Abercrombie

135. “Anyone can face ease and success with confidence. It is the way we face trouble and misfortune that defines us. Self-pity goes with selfishness, and there is nothing more to be deplored in a leader than that. Selfishness belongs to children, and to half-wits. A great leader puts others before himself. You would be surprised how acting so makes it easier to bear one’s own troubles. In order to act like a King, one need only treat everyone else like one.”

— Joe Abercrombie

136. “Death waits for us all. But she takes the lazy first.”

— Joe Abercrombie

137. “I don’t trust a man who drinks,’ he growled, not bothered about dressing it up. ‘A man takes to drinking, then he gets weak, then his mind goes.’ Cosca sadly shook his head. ‘You have it back to front. A man’s mind goes, then he gets weak, then he takes to drink. The bottle is the symptom, not the cause.”

— Joe Abercrombie

138. “Cleverness is no guarantee of sensible behaviour.”

— Joe Abercrombie

139. “Why do I do it, when it always hurts me? Why must we test the pain? Tongue the ulcer, rub the blister, pick the scab?”

— Joe Abercrombie

140. “A good thief goes unseen. A truly great one merely goes unnoticed. She.”

— Joe Abercrombie

141. “Pardon me,’ said Glokta, wiping his running eye with a finger, ’but I spent two years in the Emperor’s prisons. I daresay, if I had known I’d be there half that long at the start, I would have made a more concerted effort to kill myself.”

— Joe Abercrombie

142. “Unhappy times are the best for levity. You don’t light candles in the middle of the day, do you?”

— Joe Abercrombie

143. “The world is full of monsters, after all. Perhaps the best one can hope for is to have the most terrible on your side.”

— Joe Abercrombie

144. “Fear has made them sloppy. The world teeters at a precipe. All scared to take a step in case they put a foot into empty air. The instinct of self-preservation. It can destroy a man’s efficiency.”

— Joe Abercrombie

145. “Sometimes when I’m really enjoying a book, I’ll read a sentence or paragraph and just think – how can someone’s head be wired in such a way that they’d come up with that?”

— Joe Abercrombie

146. “Enough pain makes a coward of anyone.”

— Joe Abercrombie

147. “Those with the least always lose the most in war.”

— Joe Abercrombie

148. “Who asked your opinion?’ ‘A man who doesn’t want opinions should keep his own mouth shut.”

— Joe Abercrombie

149. “It’s hard to stay calm when you’re terrified, helpless, alone, at the mercy of men with no mercy at all.”

— Joe Abercrombie

150. “Let Father Peace spill tears over the methods. Mother War smiles upon results.”

— Joe Abercrombie