Top 500 Joe Abercrombie Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “When men spoke of changing the world, they always meant to suit their own interests.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

204. “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

205. “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

206. “A sword has a voice.”

— Joe Abercrombie

207. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

213. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

216. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

218. “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

219. “People liked to think of beauty as some natural gift, but Savine firmly believed that just about anyone could be beautiful, if they worked hard at it and spent enough money. It was merely a question of emphasising the good, disguising the bad and painfully squeezing the average into the most impressive configuration. Very much like business, really.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

222. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

228. “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

229. “One should learn the lessons of history. The mistakes of the past need only be made once.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

233. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

235. “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

236. “That’s what courage is. Taking your disappointments and your failures, your guilt and your shame, all the wounds received and inflicted, and sinking them in the past. Starting again. Damning yesterday and facing tomorrow with your head held high. Times change. It’s those that see it coming, and plan for it, and change themselves to suit that prosper.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

238. “To the starving man, bread is beautiful. To the homeless man, a roof is beautiful. To the drunkard, wine is beautiful. Only those who want for nothing else need find beauty in a lump of rock. “Stolicus.”

— Joe Abercrombie

239. “You can have enemies you never really meet, Logen had plenty. You can kill men you don’t know, he’d done it often. But you can’t truly hate a man without loving him first, and there’s always a trace of that love left over.”

— Joe Abercrombie

240. “We’re all like children, Rikke. The older you get, the more you realise the grown-ups won’t suddenly walk in and set things right. You want things right, you have to put ’em right yourself.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

242. “The memories of our glories fade, and rot away into half-arsed anecdotes, thin and unconvincing as some other bastard’s lies. The failures, the disappointments, the regrets, they stay raw as the moments they happened.”

— Joe Abercrombie

243. “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

244. “Vengeance is a fleeting thrill. The doubts, we carry to our graves.”

— Joe Abercrombie

245. “Fearlessness is a fool’s boast, to my mind. The only men with no fear in them are dead, or the soon to be dead, maybe. Fear teaches you caution, and respect for your enemy, and to avoid sharp edges used in anger. All good things in their place, believe me. Fear can bring you out alive, and that’s the very best anyone can hope for from any fight. Every man who’s worth a damn feels fear. It’s the use you make of it that counts.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

247. “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

248. “Cause my mother says boys whine about what’s done. Men decide what will be.” “You always listen to your mother?” “I complain about it, but yes.”

— Joe Abercrombie

249. “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

250. “Anyway, it seems to me a man can do an awful lot of evil in no time at all. Swing of a blade is all it takes. Doing good needs time. And all manner of complicated efforts. Most men don’t have the patience for it. ‘Specially not these days.”

— Joe Abercrombie