Top 400 Mark Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Some people are born to rub you the wrong way. Brother Gemt was born to rub the world the wrong way.”

— Mark Lawrence

102. “I’m a liar and a cheat and a coward, but I will never, ever, rarely let a friend down.”

— Mark Lawrence

103. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

116. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

118. “The eyes can be deceived. People can be deceived. A lie can be used for good ends as well as bad. An illusion that is never dispelled is a reality all of its own.”

— Mark Lawrence

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

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. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

125. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

129. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

134. “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

135. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

138. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

140. “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

141. “I want her beyond reason. I need to own, consume, worship, devour. What I’ve made of her in my mind cannot live in flesh.”

— Mark Lawrence

142. “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

143. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

145. “The Danes had a great love of sea stories and the old sagas. Snorri provided the former from personal experience and Kara the latter from her vast store of such trivia. I half-thought some of the duke’s men would volunteer to join the Undoreth and travel with the Vikings such was the level of worship on display...”

— Mark Lawrence

146. “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

147. “After the dream-witch’s visit I resolved never to sleep again.”

— Mark Lawrence

148. “All lives are tales. Some spread, and grow in the telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce.”

— Mark Lawrence

149. “But children have resilience. Children scar and those scars remain across the years, but children grow too. Kettle grew around her hurts and learned to laugh again – learned wickedness as they taught her scripture – learned the swiftness of her body and the sharpness of her mind. She grew into a woman and learned to love and to be loved.”

— Mark Lawrence

150. “A great comfort, Tuttugu. I always like to do my drowning within sight of land.”

— Mark Lawrence