Top 500 Joe Abercrombie Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

159. “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

160. “The Shanka might be ever so full of mad fury, but even they had to fear him. Everything did. Even the dead, who felt no pain. Even the cold stone, which did not dream. Even the molten iron feared the Bloody-Nine. Even the darkness.”

— Joe Abercrombie

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “Everyone likes me,” said Caul Shivers, the most feared man in the North.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

172. “Dogman remembered the smell of her hair, the sound of her laugh, the feel of her back, pressed warm and soft against his belly while she slept. Well-used memories, picked over and worn thin like a favourite shirt.”

— Joe Abercrombie

173. “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

174. “Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with their world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and their small reasons. It was selfishness and carelessness and waste. It was bad luck, incompetence, and stupidity. It was violence divorced from conscience or consequence. It was high ideals, even, and low methods.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

176. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

181. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

183. “Just keep in mind what Rudd Threetrees once told me. Let’s us get them killed, and not the other way round.’ Wonderful grinned. ‘Best damn advice about war I ever heard.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

185. “Funny how, whenever men talked about freedom, they never really meant for the women.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

187. “Nothing like being wanted, is there? Wanted by someone you want. Always seems like magic, that something can feel so good but cost nothing.”

— Joe Abercrombie

188. “You want a thing when you can’t have it. When you get it you suddenly sprout doubts. Then when you think you might lose it you find you need it worse than ever.”

— Joe Abercrombie

189. “The sad truth is, men love to follow a man other men fear,” said Clover. “Makes them feel fearsome, too. We tell the odd fond story of the good men. The straight edges. Your Rudd Threetrees, your Dogmen. But it’s the butchers men love to sing of. The burners and the blood-spillers. Your Cracknut Whirruns and your Black Dows. Your Bloody-Nines. Men don’t dream of doing the right thing, but of ripping what they want from the world with their strength and their will.”

— Joe Abercrombie

190. “Years, back, when they first made him a sergeant, he’d imagined the officers much have all the answers. When he was given his commission, he’d imagined the generals must have all the answers. When King Orso made him a general, he’d imagined the Closed counsel bust have all the answers. Now, as a lord marshal, he finally knew it for an absolute fact. No one had the answers. Worse. There weren’t any.”

— Joe Abercrombie

191. “What’s the plan now, then?’ ‘Plans have a habit o’ falling apart when you lean on ’em,’ said Lamb. ‘We’ll just have to think up another.’ The Kantic cracked a bastard of a frown. ‘I do not like a man who breaks an agreement.’ ‘Try and push me off a cliff.’ Lamb gave Jubair a flat stare. ‘We can find out who God likes best.’ Jubair pressed one fingertip against his lips and considered that for a long, silent moment. Then he shrugged. ‘I prefer not to trouble God with every little thing.”

— Joe Abercrombie

192. “Damn, he was bored. It was a fact, he was only now beginning to realise, that the conversation of the drunk is only interesting to the drunk. A few glasses on wine can be the difference between finding a man a hilarious companion or an insufferable moron.”

— Joe Abercrombie

193. “To have a good enemy, choose a friend: he knows where to strike.”

— Joe Abercrombie

194. “The thing about history is you don’t know what the right side is till long afterwards, and by then it hardly matters.” “That’s the sort o’ thing you hear from folk who know they’re on the wrong side.”

— Joe Abercrombie

195. “Some men are made for doing violence. Some are meant for planning it. Then there are a special few whose talent is for taking the credit.”

— Joe Abercrombie

196. “Believe it or not, we all want what’s best. The root o’ the world’s ills is that no one can agree on what it is.”

— Joe Abercrombie

197. “He was naked aside from a cloth tied round his waist. To spare the delicate sensibilities of the ladies present. Watching a man’s entrails spilling out is excellent entertainment, but the sight of his cock, well, that would be obscene. A.”

— Joe Abercrombie

198. “The most civilized place in the world,” murmured Father Yarvi. “Though that mostly means folk prefer to stab each other in the back than in the front.”

— Joe Abercrombie

199. “Guilt is a luxury reserved for those still breathing and with no unbearable pain, cold or hunger demanding all their fickle attention. Long as guilt’s your biggest problem, girl... ” Rikke saw the faint gleam of Isern’s teeth in the gathering darkness. “Things can’t be that bad”.”

— Joe Abercrombie

200. “It always catches people by surprise, the moment of their death, even when they should see it coming. They always think they’re special, somehow expect a reprieve. But no one’s special.”

— Joe Abercrombie