Top 500 Joe Abercrombie Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

206. “Along with the constant pain was the constant need to pretend you weren’t in pain at all, as though the worst thing about your agony was that it might put other people out.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

209. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

219. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

226. “People without hope are a dangerous crowd, even in a republic.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

234. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

241. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

246. “A sword has a voice.”

— Joe Abercrombie

247. “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

248. “Your death comes.”

— Joe Abercrombie

249. “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

250. “Battles may sometimes be won by the brave, but wars are always won by the clever.”

— Joe Abercrombie