Top 500 Joe Abercrombie Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “You keep your guard too low, I am afraid. You are full of passion, but passion without discipline is no more than a child’s tantrum.”

— Joe Abercrombie

202. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

204. “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

205. “Gratitude and resentment are brothers eternal, after all.”

— Joe Abercrombie

206. “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

207. “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

208. “Bravery is the dead man’s virtue.”

— Joe Abercrombie

209. “The great wage secret wars for power and wealth, and they call it government. Wars of words, and tricks, and guile, but no less bloody for that. The casualties are many.”

— Joe Abercrombie

210. “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

211. “The elves knew the true names of these rivers,’ said Skifr, who’d made a kind of bed among the cargo to drape herself on. ‘We call them Divine and Denied because those are as close as our clumsy human tongues can come.”

— Joe Abercrombie

212. “Men can have all manner of deeply held beliefs about the world in general that they find most inconvenient when called upon to apply to their own lives. Few people let morality get in the way of expediency. Or even convenience. A man who truly believes in a thing beyond the point where it costs him is a rare and dangerous thing.”

— Joe Abercrombie

213. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

215. “Never take eggs from a metal-eyed man.”

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

219. “Strong leaders might like it when someone brings ’em a better idea. But weak ones never do.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “They say it’s men with nothing to lose you should fear. But it’s them who fear most.”

— Joe Abercrombie

225. “Life – the way it really is – is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse’ Joseph Brodsky.”

— Joe Abercrombie

226. “I apologise if I bore you!’ ‘I accept your apology.’ ‘I was joking!’ ‘Ah. Your wit is so very sharp I hardly noticed I was cut.”

— Joe Abercrombie

227. “I never saw men act with such ignorance, violence and self-serving malice as when energised by a just cause.”

— Joe Abercrombie

228. “You have to pick your moment. He’d always said so. Told everyone who’d listen. Have to recognise it when it comes, and seize it, with no care for the past and no worries about the future.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

230. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

232. “He had always thought of civilisation as a machine, cast from rigid iron, everything riveted in its proper place. Now he saw it was a fabric gauzy as a bride’s veil. A tissue everyone agrees to leave in place, but one that can be ripped away in an instant. And hell lurks just beneath.”

— Joe Abercrombie

233. “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

234. “And so the doubts begin... Our doom draws nearer, and every man sees it. A strange thing, death. Far away, you can laugh at it, but as it comes closer it looks worse and worse. Close enough to touch, and no one laughs.”

— Joe Abercrombie

235. “There’s always a worse case than your worst case, and more often than not, it happens.”

— Joe Abercrombie

236. “A sword has a voice.”

— Joe Abercrombie

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

243. “You look especially beautiful this morning, Monza.’ She sighed, as if that was an accident. As if she hadn’t spent an hour preening herself before the mirror. ‘Facts are facts. Stating them isn’t a gift. You only prove you’re not blind.’ She yawned, stretched in her saddle, made him wait a moment longer. ‘But I’ll hear more.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

245. “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

246. “A look of fury, a look of pain, a look of hatred you can trust. A smile can hide anything.”

— Joe Abercrombie

247. “There’s always good men on both sides of a good fight.”

— Joe Abercrombie

248. “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

249. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie