Top 500 Joe Abercrombie Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Call it art, you can get away with anything.”

— Joe Abercrombie

202. “But you know what they say – old milk turns sour but old scores just get sweeter.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

204. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

206. “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

207. “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

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

— 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. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

218. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

224. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

226. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

228. “A sword has a voice.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

230. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

232. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

234. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

236. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “You keep your wine in a paper bag, you shouldn’t be too upset when it leaks.”

— Joe Abercrombie

242. “Never doubt another’s choices, I say. You can’t know his reasons.”

— 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. “When men say things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them, because they were young, and had all their hopes intact. The world is bound to look a darker place as you slide into the grave.”

— Joe Abercrombie

245. “I despise violence. It is the last tool of feeble minds.”

— Joe Abercrombie

246. “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

247. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

249. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie