Top 500 Joe Abercrombie Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

255. “Everyone likes me,” said Caul Shivers, the most feared man in the North.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

260. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

262. “And Yarvi realized that Death does not bow to each person who passes her, does not sweep out her arm respectfully to show the way, speaks no profound words, unlocks no bolts. The key upon her chest is never needed, for the Last Door stands always open. She herds the dead through impatiently, needles of rank or fame or quality. She has an ever-lengthening queue to get through. A blind procession, inexhaustible.”

— Joe Abercrombie

263. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

266. “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

267. “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

268. “Facing an enemy on the battlefield took courage, but you had your friends beside you. Standing alone against your friends, that was a different kind of courage.”

— Joe Abercrombie

269. “But I guess you learn to stop hoping, after a while. Life teaches you to expect the worst, eh?”

— Joe Abercrombie

270. “Glorious victories make fine songs, Yarvi, but inglorious ones are no worse once the bards are done with them. Glorious defeats, meanwhile, are just defeats.”

— Joe Abercrombie

271. “He flowed up to the first wall, slid one leg over it, silent as a mouse. He lifted himself up, smooth as butter, keeping quiet, keeping low. His back foot caught on a set of loose stones, dragged them scraping with him. He grabbed at them, fumbled them, knocked over even more with his elbow and they clattered down loud around him. He stumbled onto his weak ankle, twisted it, squawked with pain, fell over and rolled through a patch of thistles.”

— Joe Abercrombie

272. “The birth of spring is perhaps not the best time to cross a mountain range,’ observed Longfoot under his breath. Bayaz looked sharply sideways. ‘Some would say the best time to cross an obstacle is when one finds oneself on the wrong side of it! Or do you suggest we wait for summer?”

— Joe Abercrombie

273. “Men are brittle, I reckon. They don’t bend into new shapes. They get broken into them. Crushed into them.”

— Joe Abercrombie

274. “If you judge your thoughts worth hearing, pronounce them proudly, push them to every corner of the chamber, fill the hall with your hopes and desires and make every listener share them! If you are ashamed of your thoughts, better to leave a silence.”

— Joe Abercrombie

275. “There are few ills a good cup of tea won’t help with.”

— Joe Abercrombie

276. “Enough to make a man believe in God,’ said Temple. ‘And that He’s somewhere else.”

— Joe Abercrombie

277. “But I’d rather not add to my regrets. The gods know I got a queue of the bastards.”

— Joe Abercrombie

278. “What is love anyway, but finding someone who suits you? Someone who makes up for your shortcomings? Someone you can work with. Work on.”

— Joe Abercrombie

279. “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

280. “You can’t become attached to things, not out here in the wild.”

— Joe Abercrombie

281. “Strange how, as long as the hardship lasts, we can stand it. As soon as the crisis is over, the strength all leeches away in an instant.”

— Joe Abercrombie

282. “A length of wood does not by itself make a man wise, or noble, or powerful, any more than a length of steel does. Power comes from the flesh, my boy, and from the heart, and from the head. From the head most of all.”

— Joe Abercrombie

283. “All things considered, and well against the run of luck, he reckoned he’d come out alright. Might be he’d lost an eye down here in Styria. Might be he was leaving no richer than when he’d stepped off the boat. But he was a better man, of that he’d no doubt. A wiser man. Used to be he was his own worst enemy. Now he was everyone else’s.”

— Joe Abercrombie

284. “Crowds rarely cheer too loudly for the defeated, no matter how hard they fought, how great their sacrifices, how long the odds. Maidens might wet themselves over cheap and worthless victories, but they don’t so much as blush for ‘I did my best.”

— Joe Abercrombie

285. “Once you set your mind on killing, it is hard to choose the number of the dead.”

— Joe Abercrombie

286. “News spoils quick, friend, like milk.’ ‘I say it gets better if carefully kept, like wine.’ ‘I’m glad you like the vintage, but I ain’t buying yesterday’s news.”

— Joe Abercrombie

287. “A name to fill strong men with fear or courage, depending on which side they stand.”

— Joe Abercrombie

288. “Every man who’s worth a damn feels fear. It’s the use you make of it that counts.”

— Joe Abercrombie

289. “He had discovered early in his military career that if one has an effective and experienced officer above, coupled with effective and experienced soldiers below, one need do, and know, nothing.”

— Joe Abercrombie

290. “As a writer, you have to first of all write what you want to. Listen to advice, by all means, but don’t get bogged down in it.”

— Joe Abercrombie

291. “Being in charge can seem like a thing iron-forged, but in the end it’s just an idea everyone agrees to.”

— Joe Abercrombie

292. “Life’s a queue of small irritations with the Last Door at the end.”

— Joe Abercrombie

293. “They passed lands that had no name, where fens of mirror pools stretched into unknown distances, thousands of fragments of sky sprinkled across this bastard offspring of earth and sea, lonely birds calling out over the desolation, and Yarvi breathed deep the salt chill and longed for home.”

— Joe Abercrombie

294. “He was one of those men loves to be despised. That treats loathing like gold, to be clawed for and hoarded up. He hadn’t learned yet that hate’s the one thing never runs out.”

— Joe Abercrombie

295. “I have a plan,” said Nothing. “Does it involve a sword?” asked Jaud. A pause. “All my plans do.” “Do you have a sword?” Another. “No.” “How will your plan work without one?” muttered Sumael. A third. “Death waits for us all.”

— Joe Abercrombie

296. “The people far prefer a leader who appears great, to one who is.”

— Joe Abercrombie

297. “That’s what an idiot does when he gets angry. He destroys whatever’s nearest, even if it’s his own house!”

— Joe Abercrombie

298. “All too often when we topple something hateful, rather than breaking it and starting afresh, we raise ourselves up in its place.”

— Joe Abercrombie

299. “One need not love one’s enemy, or even fear him, to desire peace. One need only love oneself.”

— Joe Abercrombie

300. “Are you drunk?’ ‘It’s the afternoon, isn’t it? I try always to be drunk by now. Once you start a job you should give it your best.”

— Joe Abercrombie