Top 500 Joe Abercrombie Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

254. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

268. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

270. “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

271. “Winning made people friendly. Winning too much made them nervous.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

273. “Knowledge is so often the antidote to fear. But not here. Not now.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

275. “Respect costs you nothing, and nothing gets a man killed quicker than confidence.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

277. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

279. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

281. “Magnificent,’ muttered Glokta, stretching out his aching back and squinting up, the pure white stone almost painful to look at in the afternoon glare. ‘Seeing this, one could almost believe in God.’ If one didn’t know better.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

283. “The gods hate those who plan badly, and help those with good friends, good swords, and good sense. Worry less about what the gods might do and more about what you can, that’s my advice.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

291. “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

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

295. “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

296. “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

297. “Never trust a man beyond his own interests.”

— Joe Abercrombie

298. “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

299. “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

300. “A cynic might observe that the scriptures can be used to support both sides of every argument.”

— Joe Abercrombie