Top 500 Joe Abercrombie Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “The ones you like straight away rarely turn out to be your favourites.”

— Joe Abercrombie

402. “Well.” Glokta looked towards the summer revellers. So near to them, yet somehow in a different world. “I have often said that life is the misery we endure between disappointments.”

— Joe Abercrombie

403. “What better foundation for an alliance than mutual hatred and suspicion?”

— Joe Abercrombie

404. “Nothing to it. You treat folk the way you’d want to be treated, and you can’t go far wrong.”

— Joe Abercrombie

405. “She surely can cook a fight from the most peaceful ingredients. But nothing worth doing is easy. I love her in spite of it. I love her because of it. I love her.” And his face broke out in that grin again. “Every day’s a new adventure, that’s for sure.”

— Joe Abercrombie

406. “It’s a crime, when you think about how little time we get, that a man should ever be bored. When you are lying on your death bead, I expect you regret those weeks wasted more than your worst mistakes.”

— Joe Abercrombie

407. “It is easy to speak of the past, impossible to go there.”

— Joe Abercrombie

408. “Hoping for a thing often seems the best way o’ bringing on the opposite.”

— Joe Abercrombie

409. “Vick learned long ago that might have is a game with no winners. Few games do have winners, in the end.”

— Joe Abercrombie

410. “There’s no need to rush, Arch Lector. That’s the trouble with good legs, you tend to run around too much. If you have trouble moving, on the other hand, you don’t move until you damn well know it’s time.”

— Joe Abercrombie

411. “When do I rest, then?” “In the songs of great heroes, do you hear often of resting?”

— Joe Abercrombie

412. “There’s no changing yesterday. Only tomorrow.”

— Joe Abercrombie

413. “Memories sharp enough to cut himself on – the smells, the sounds, the feel of the air on his skin, the desperate hope and mad anger.”

— Joe Abercrombie

414. “You keep an oath not for the oath but for yourself.”

— Joe Abercrombie

415. “It is healthy to be disabused of our self-deceptions every now and then, even if it hurts.”

— Joe Abercrombie

416. “Everyone finds a way to make their side the right one, after all.”

— Joe Abercrombie

417. “He was less and less sure with every day that being a better man was worth all the effort.”

— Joe Abercrombie

418. “He was developing a sneaking feeling he had found his way onto the wrong side. Again. But it’s not always easy to tell when you’re picking. Perhaps, as Kahdia once told him, you are on the wrong side as soon as you pick one.”

— Joe Abercrombie

419. “No one cares about the past any more,′ he whispered. ‘They don’t see that you can’t have a future without a past.”

— Joe Abercrombie

420. “Still, it was better to swear an oath and never follow through than not even to bother with the oath. Wasn’t it?”

— Joe Abercrombie

421. “Some men you stick to right off. But it’s those that take time to stick that stick longest.”

— Joe Abercrombie

422. “I always thought of being together as the end of the work. Turns out it’s where the work starts.”

— Joe Abercrombie

423. “Un hombre debe ser capaz de conocer sus propias limitaciones.”

— Joe Abercrombie

424. “Men must sometimes do what they do not like if they are to be remembered.”

— Joe Abercrombie

425. “By swap news do you mean drink?” “I do, and that excessively.”

— Joe Abercrombie

426. “Broad kept sweeping. He’d learned in Styria there’s a lot of things that are better not thought about. Couldn’t be a coincidence that the happiest men Broad had ever known were generally the stupidest.”

— Joe Abercrombie

427. “There is a time for wondering what a man wants,” said Fror, no fear at all in his. “And there is a time for splitting his head. This is that second time.”

— Joe Abercrombie

428. “You’re a fine one to talk, Skinny Rikke. Every pinch o’ meat fell off you when you went to see the witch. You’re like a head stuck on a spear these days, but without the flies. Most o’ the flies, at least.” And she burst out laughing.”

— Joe Abercrombie

429. “Some men laugh easily. It makes them winning dinner companions.”

— Joe Abercrombie

430. “It was difficult to maintain any sense of superiority in the face of his utter dependence on other people.”

— Joe Abercrombie

431. “One body might just be a coincidence. Two make a conspiracy.”

— Joe Abercrombie

432. “Evil is not the opposite of good. It is what we call another man’s notion of good when it differs from ours.”

— Joe Abercrombie

433. “Love and hate have just a knife’s edge between them.”

— Joe Abercrombie

434. “There was the very slightest pause. Probably no more than a breath, for all it felt far longer. While everyone assessed the odds and the outcomes. While everyone judged just where the shifting power sat. While everything dropped into place in Dimbik’s mind and, no doubt, the minds of every other person present. Just a breath, and everything was rearranged.”

— Joe Abercrombie

435. “Could he truly pretend that he wanted to be her friend? A friendship between a man and a woman was what you called it when one had been pursuing the other for a long time, and had never got anywhere.”

— Joe Abercrombie

436. “Why give them a proper burning?” Rulf caught the lad by the arm. “Because if we beat beggars here, we’re no better than beggars. If we beat great men, we’re greater still.”

— Joe Abercrombie

437. “Stacked up after the plague came through, spread out after a battle?’ ‘Aye, I’ve seen that.’ ‘Did you notice some of those corpses had a kind of glow about them? A sweet smell like roses on a spring morning?’ Shivers frowned. ‘No.’ ‘The good men and the bad, then – all looked about the same, did they? They always did to me, I can tell you that.”

— Joe Abercrombie

438. “In bloody days, swords were worth more than gods.”

— Joe Abercrombie

439. “Shock and surprise, my little beauties, and quickness to strike, and lack of pity. These are the things that make a killer.”

— Joe Abercrombie

440. “Either you are a part of my future, or a relic of the past.”

— Joe Abercrombie

441. “Secrets, power. It’s all a metaphor.”

— Joe Abercrombie

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

— Joe Abercrombie

443. “When you have a load to lift, you’re better lifting than weeping.”

— Joe Abercrombie

444. “A dour-faced woman was working at a spinning wheel on a doorstep, and she frowned at Logen as he walked past with the unconscious apprentice over his shoulder. Logen smiled back at her. She was no beauty, that was sure, but it had been a very long time. The woman ducked into her house and kicked the door shut, leaving the wheel spinning. Logen sighed. The old magic was still there.”

— Joe Abercrombie

445. “We all got our reasons... good men and bad men. It’s all a matter of where you stand.”

— Joe Abercrombie

446. “There was nothing to be gained by losing his temper. There was never anything to be gained by that.”

— Joe Abercrombie

447. “Logen still remembered the first time he had to leave someone behind, remembered it like it was yesterday. Strange how the boy’s name had gone but the face was with him still.”

— Joe Abercrombie

448. “I apologise, your Highness. Murder can be a painful business.”

— Joe Abercrombie

449. “Perhaps the vengeance could wait, at least until he had a bigger blade to work with. You have to be realistic, after all.”

— Joe Abercrombie

450. “She never saw more damage done than by folk acting on high principle.”

— Joe Abercrombie