Top 500 Joe Abercrombie Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “Here is the perennial trouble with burying your past. Others are forever trying to dig it up.”

— Joe Abercrombie

202. “Honest men are so very rare, they are often mistaken for criminals, for rebels, for madmen. What were your crimes, anyway, but to be different?”

— Joe Abercrombie

203. “Rejoice in what you have. Power, wealth, fame, they are ghosts! They are like the breeze, impossible to hold. There is no grand destination. Every path ends at the Last Door. Revel in the sparks one person strikes from another.” She huddled into her cloak of rags. “They are the only light in the darkness of time.”

— Joe Abercrombie

204. “Repetition – the curse of the old.”

— Joe Abercrombie

205. “Chose? If you believe that I chose any part of the pitiful shadow of a life you see before you, you are very much mistaken. I chose glory and success. The box did not contain what was written on the lid.”

— Joe Abercrombie

206. “The food of fear is ignorance, Mother Gundring used to say. The death of fear is knowledge. When you study a race of men you find they are just men like any others.”

— Joe Abercrombie

207. “You can always make enemies of your friends,′ said Sumael. ‘Making friends of your enemies is harder labor.”

— Joe Abercrombie

208. “Dogman and Dow, Tul and Grim, West and Pike. Six of them, stood in a circle and looking down at two piles of cold earth. Below in the valley, the Union were busy burying their own dead, Dogman had seen it. Hundreds of ’em, in pits for a dozen each. It was a bad day for men, all in all, and a good one for the ground. Always the way, after a battle. Only the ground wins. Shivers.”

— Joe Abercrombie

209. “Threats for tomorrow don’t cut very deep when today is so damn threatening.”

— Joe Abercrombie

210. “Your death comes.”

— Joe Abercrombie

211. “I think the further away you get from completing a book, the more responses you see to it from readers, the more your own tastes and opinions shift and the more you start to see things you could have written differently in the detail, or done differently on the broader scale of plot and character.”

— Joe Abercrombie

212. “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

213. “The lowly have small ambitions, and are satisfied with small indulgences. They need not get fair treatment. They need only think that they do...”

— Joe Abercrombie

214. “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. So Logen said nothing. Calder could take that for weakness if he pleased, and so much the better. Fights might find Logen depressingly often, but he was long, long past looking for them.”

— Joe Abercrombie

215. “The faster you run from the past, the faster it catches you. All you can do is turn to face it. Embrace it. Try and meet the future wiser for it.”

— Joe Abercrombie

216. “You make yourself too hard, you make yourself brittle too. Crack once, crack all to pieces.”

— Joe Abercrombie

217. “When men spoke of changing the world, they always meant to suit their own interests.”

— Joe Abercrombie

218. “Relief, or disappointment? Hard to tell the difference.”

— Joe Abercrombie

219. “Blood gets you nothing but more blood. It follows me now, always, like my shadow, and like my shadow I can never be free of it. I should never be free of it. I’ve earned it. I’ve deserved it. I’ve sought it out. Such is my punishment.”

— Joe Abercrombie

220. “No one remembers how the fight was won. I won. No one cares how.”

— Joe Abercrombie

221. “Maybe you should try sticking to one side or the other.’ ‘Why ever would anyone do that?’ Cosca raised his flask, took a sip and smacked his lips in satisfaction. ‘It’s a war. There is no right side.”

— Joe Abercrombie

222. “How you feeling Forley?’ asked the Dogman. ‘Bad, but you got to have fear to have courage.”

— Joe Abercrombie

223. “A sword has a voice.”

— Joe Abercrombie

224. “When life is a cell, there is nothing more liberating than captivity.”

— Joe Abercrombie

225. “And is vengeance all you think of, every minute of every day, your only desire?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Hurting them? Killing them? Ending them?’ ‘Yes!’ ‘You want nothing for yourself?’ She paused. ‘What?’ ‘For yourself. What do you want?’ She stared at the old man suspiciously, but no reply came to her. Yulwei shook his head sadly. ‘It seems to me, Ferro Maljinn, that you are as much a slave as you ever were. Or ever could be.”

— Joe Abercrombie

226. “Enemies are like furniture, aren’t they? Better chosen for oneself than inherited.”

— Joe Abercrombie

227. “Oftentimes,’ murmured Whirrun, ’a man’s better served embracing his pain than trying to escape it. Things are smaller when you face ’em.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

229. “Ever think maybe you drink too much?” asked Wonderful. Clover smacked his lips. “Too much would, by definition, be too much. I find however much I drink is just the right amount.”

— Joe Abercrombie

230. “I got into reading a lot of noir and a lot of thrillers as well, and I really admired the plotting about those and the way that they can surprise you. And obviously to surprise people and to have twists in the tale, you have to plan quite carefully.”

— Joe Abercrombie

231. “Sometimes a difficult journey does not deliver its full benefit until long after one returns. The trials are brief, but the wisdom gained lasts a lifetime!”

— Joe Abercrombie

232. “There’s no disappointment like getting what you’ve always wanted...”

— Joe Abercrombie

233. “But it is easy to speak of the past, impossible to go there. I am powerful in ways you can only dream, yet I am still a prisoner of what I have done. I can never escape the cell I have made for myself. Things are what they are.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

235. “I find hope is best abandoned early,’ muttered Temple.”

— Joe Abercrombie

236. “Modesty’s for folk with nothing to boast of.”

— Joe Abercrombie

237. “When he’d made it thirty strides or so Logen turned around and looked back. The pot was sitting forlorn by the lake, already filling up with rainwater. They’d been through a lot together, him and that pot. “Fare you well, old friend.” The pot did not reply.”

— Joe Abercrombie

238. “My master appreciates that we must sometimes have a little chaos if a better order is to emerge. There can be no progress without pain, no creation without destruction. That is why he has indulged this little war of yours. My master loves to see the earth ploughed, from time to time.”

— Joe Abercrombie

239. “Fine lies beat tedious truths every time.”

— Joe Abercrombie

240. “Killing a man by accident had made her a villain. Killing another on purpose had made her a hero. But all she could do was frown at the body as they dragged it out, and feel there was something very odd in all this.”

— Joe Abercrombie

241. “Promises are like flowers, often given, rarely kept.”

— Joe Abercrombie

242. “But it’s ’cause real life is what it is that a man needs daydreams.”

— Joe Abercrombie

243. “Aye, well, one person’s mad is another’s remarkable.”

— Joe Abercrombie

244. “One step at a time,’ he muttered to himself as he clambered up the slope. That was the only way to look at it. If you clenched your teeth hard enough, and took enough strides, you could get anywhere. One painful, weary, freezing, guilty step at a time.”

— Joe Abercrombie

245. “Rising early. Of course. The second greatest virtue. It comes just behind ruthlessness.”

— Joe Abercrombie

246. “Magnificent,’ muttered Glokta, stretching out his aching back and squinting up, the pure white stone almost painful to look at in the afternoon glare. ‘Seeing this, one could almost believe in God.’ If one didn’t know better.”

— Joe Abercrombie

247. “Logen pulled the knife out of his boot and rammed the blade into the side of the giant’s neck. He looked surprised, for just a moment, then blood dribbled from his mouth and down his chin. He let go of Logen’s shirt, stumbled back, spun slowly round, bounced off one of the stones and crashed on his face. Seemed that Logen’s father had been right. You can never have too many knives.”

— Joe Abercrombie

248. “I was too busy wallowing in pain and bitterness. Too busy being tragic.”

— Joe Abercrombie

249. “He trusted to God, since there was no one else. He hoped for heaven. But he fully expected the alternative.”

— Joe Abercrombie

250. “If you can’t find anything to complain about you aren’t looking hard enough.”

— Joe Abercrombie