Top 400 Mark Lawrence Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “It’s true that my foe outnumbered me, but I am the hero of Aral Pass, after all, and sometimes when Prince Jalan Kendeth is roused to anger it’s best to flee, whatever your number. If you’re eight.”

— Mark Lawrence

102. “The road to damnation is paved with tardy steps!”

— Mark Lawrence

103. “Fear is a strange thing. Along with its close friend, pain, fear is a vital part of the kit that evolution has furnished us with for keeping alive. Part of its effectiveness comes down to how hard it can be to overcome.”

— Mark Lawrence

104. “The future is a dark place. We all die there.”

— Mark Lawrence

105. “Whatever you do in dangerous situations, the main thing is to do it quickly.”

— Mark Lawrence

106. “Moons might rise and fall, empires wax and wane, even the stars come and go, but there are constants too, and though the story of our kind is ever-changing it is also always the same.”

— Mark Lawrence

107. “Some people are born to rub you the wrong way. Brother Gemt was born to rub the world the wrong way.”

— Mark Lawrence

108. “I’m a liar and a cheat and a coward, but I will never, ever, let a friend down. Unless of course not letting them down requires honesty, fair play, or bravery.”

— Mark Lawrence

109. “They warned of taints lingering from the Builders’ war, stains from their poisons, or shadows from the Day of a Thousand Suns.”

— Mark Lawrence

110. “Thor might be god of strength and war, Odin of wisdom, but he sometimes wondered if it wasn’t Loki, the trickster god, who stood behind what unfolded. A lie can run deeper than strength or wisdom. And hadn’t the world proved to be a bitter joke?”

— Mark Lawrence

111. “We weren’t meant to live forever, nor dwell in solitude. A life without change is no life.”

— Mark Lawrence

112. “Confusing the author and the character seems to be a popular and rather unsophisticated reaction to books.”

— Mark Lawrence

113. “Geography is like history. History is the story of mankind since we first started to record it. The story and the understanding of that story. Geography is the history of the world beneath our feet. The mountains and the ice, rivers, oceans, land, all of it recorded in the very rocks themselves for those with the wit to read what’s set there.”

— Mark Lawrence

114. “It didn’t happen for a reason, Alann. These things never do. Hurt spills over into hurt, like water over stones. There’s no foreseeing it, no knowing who it will touch, who will be left standing.”

— Mark Lawrence

115. “Lundist held that a man who can observe is a man apart. Such a man can see opportunities where others see only the obstacles.”

— Mark Lawrence

116. “You got responsibilities when you’re a leader. You got a responsibility not to kill too many of your men. Or who’re you going to lead?”

— Mark Lawrence

117. “A man driving a wagonload of children in a cage doesn’t have to state his business. A farmer whose flesh lies sunken around his bones, and whose eyes are the colour of hunger, doesn’t have to explain himself if he walks up to such a man. Hunger lies beneath all of our ugliest transactions.”

— Mark Lawrence

118. “We are memories, strung on storylines – the tales we tell ourselves about ourselves, falling through our lives into tomorrow.”

— Mark Lawrence

119. “Still, children hope in ways adults find hard to imagine. They carry their dreams before them, fragile, in both arms, waiting for the world to trip them.”

— Mark Lawrence

120. “I didn’t know what I would do except that Edris Dean would be dead at the end of it.”

— Mark Lawrence

121. “You soon learn there’s no elegance or dignity in death if you spend time in the castle kitchens. You learn how ugly it is, and how good it tastes.”

— Mark Lawrence

122. “A man is made of memories. It is all we are. Captured moments, the smell of a place, scenes played out time and again on a small stage. We are memories, strung on storylines – the tales we tell ourselves about ourselves, falling through our lives into tomorrow.”

— Mark Lawrence

123. “It never pays to walk blindly. Especially not in your own castle where familiarity hides so much – even when we have the eyes to see.”

— Mark Lawrence

124. “We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretence of understanding. We paper over the voids in our comprehension with science or religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us.”

— Mark Lawrence

125. “Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.”

— Mark Lawrence

126. “A man’s first taste of the poppy gives him something glorious and wonderful, something that he strives to recapture with each return to the resin, but in the end he needs to smoke it just to feel human. Life is the same for many of us – a few scant years of golden youth when everything tastes sweet, every experience new and sharp with meaning. Then a long slow grind to the grave, trying and failing to recapture that feeling you had when you were seventeen and the world rolled out before you.”

— Mark Lawrence

127. “He said it would ward off evil spirits. That just left me the good ones to worry about.”

— Mark Lawrence

128. “Orrin of Arrow might have given them bread. He might have resolved to change this place. I just walk through it. Later I will scrape it from my shoes.”

— Mark Lawrence

129. “As a child in poverty you never know that you’re poor, the slums are the slums. They’re home. They’re what is. So I’d never felt poor. But Me-me made us feel rich. She carried smiles with her.”

— Mark Lawrence

130. “If there’s one good thing to be said about opera, it’s that it makes a man appreciate all other forms of entertainment so much more.”

— Mark Lawrence

131. “Spend too long watching the long game and the short game will kill you.”

— Mark Lawrence

132. “I’ll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears.”

— Mark Lawrence

133. “Sometimes my lies impressed the hell out of me.”

— Mark Lawrence

134. “Fear keeps us weak, fear of what we don’t know, and fear of what we do know.”

— Mark Lawrence

135. “It’s harder to forgive someone else your own sins than those uniquely theirs. Much harder.”

— Mark Lawrence

136. “And hunger must be fed. Any weapon begs use. The blade itself incites to violence.”

— Mark Lawrence

137. “I was born for killing – the gods made me to ruin.”

— Mark Lawrence

138. “The stars are pretty but the space between them is infinite and black with promise.”

— Mark Lawrence

139. “I had a son and I breathed for him. When we buried him my sorrow consumed me. Was my grief holy? Was it unique? All our hurts and follies are repeated time and again. Generation after generation live the same mistakes. But we’re not like the fire, or the river, or the wind – we’re not a single tune, its variations played out forever, a game of numbers until the world dies.”

— Mark Lawrence

140. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand about licentious behaviour, it’s when I’m not involved.”

— Mark Lawrence

141. “Snow’s not good. It’s just cold water gone wrong.” “Mountains.”

— Mark Lawrence

142. “Men think if they’re getting laid, everything is fine. Women think if they feel good, everything is fine. Neither turns out to be a very good indicator.”

— Mark Lawrence

143. “To err is human, to forgive is divine... but I’m only a cardinal and cardinals are human, so rather than forgiving you I’m going to err towards beating you with this stick.”

— Mark Lawrence

144. “The hard part wasn’t staying the course, it was turning from it. Too many steps taken, and leaving would cease to be an option – at least leaving and remaining whole. That was true of many paths perhaps.”

— Mark Lawrence

145. “I’ve always felt that the placement of a man’s testicles is an eloquent argument against intelligent design.”

— Mark Lawrence

146. “Every star, turning in the black depth of heaven, burns for no better reason than that humanity raised its face to look. Every great deed needs to be witnessed. Go out there and do something great.”

— Mark Lawrence

147. “Sister Pot.” Apple took her hands then released them and turned to make introductions. “Pot, meet Kettle.”

— Mark Lawrence

148. “But that was never the heart of Sweet Mercy. The shipheart wasn’t the foundation of the convent. It was always the faith. Always the notion that all men and women are our brothers and our sisters. And that faith doesn’t end with borders. It doesn’t care about heresies used to divide us, or whether you speak your prayers to a white star, or to the fields and forests and stones.”

— Mark Lawrence

149. “Every fortune-teller I ever met was a faker. First thing you should do to a soothsayer is poke them in the eye and say, ‘Didn’t see that coming, did you?”

— Mark Lawrence

150. “I value my integrity. Which is why it has a price.”

— Mark Lawrence