Top 400 Mark Lawrence Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “I’ve always felt that the placement of a man’s testicles is an eloquent argument against intelligent design.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “My own opinion is that if I keep juggling, then all the balls will stay in the air xxx and my comeuppance will never come down, however richly deserved.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

159. “So here’s the thing: bravery may be observed when a person tramples one fear whilst in secret flight from a greater terror. And those whose greatest terror is being thought a coward are always brave. I, on the other hand, am a coward. But with a little luck, a dashing smile, and the ability to lie from the hip, I’ve done a surprisingly good job of seeming a hero and of fooling most of the people most of the time.”

— Mark Lawrence

160. “The knife felt like hot iron in my fist. I hated myself for what I was going to do, and just as much for hesitating. I hated myself for the weakness in me.”

— Mark Lawrence

161. “The thing about cancer, and I guess any disaster, is that it doesn’t just go away. You don’t wake up. And, in the end, you just have to get on with things exactly like everyone else does.”

— Mark Lawrence

162. “There’s a simple joy in casting a rock into still waters and watching the ripples spread. It’s the thrill of destruction combined with the surety that all will be well again – everything as it was.”

— Mark Lawrence

163. “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

164. “Pick your fights,” Makin said. “I’ll pick my ground,” I said. “I’ll pick my ground, but I’m not running. Not ever. That’s been done, and we still have the war. I’m going to win it, Brother Makin, it’s going to end with me.” He.”

— Mark Lawrence

165. “Part of the art of survival as a coward is not letting things get to the point where that cowardice is exposed.”

— Mark Lawrence

166. “It’s what you do with time that makes it matter. I’d rather spend a year making new memories than a thousand wandering around in the same old ones.”

— Mark Lawrence

167. “There are no happy endings for such as us, Chella. No redemption. Not with our sins. Any joy is borrowed – laughter shared on the road, and left behind.” He turned to Kai. “I have killed children, Kai Summerson. In such company you will too.”

— Mark Lawrence

168. “Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason.”

— Mark Lawrence

169. “They say God watches us in every moment. But I think, in some moments, when some deeds are done, he turns his face away.”

— Mark Lawrence

170. “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

171. “Give them hell.”

— Mark Lawrence

172. “Let people pray to God, it’s nothing to me. Some good may even come of it, if goodness is something that matters to you. Trap him in churches if you must, and lament him there. But Roma? Roma is a weapon used against us. A poison flavoured sweet and given to hungry men.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

174. “Odin keep us.’ Hakon’s wisdom on the subject. ‘He’s as likely to as the White Christ.’ I had no bone to pick with heathen bone-pickers. One god or many, none of them ever seemed to like us much.”

— Mark Lawrence

175. “I cut from myself all the weakness of care. The love for my dead, I put aside, secure in a casket, an object of study, a dry exhibit, no longer bleeding, cut loose, set free. The capacity for new love, I burned out. I watered it with acid until the ground lay barren and nothing there would sprout, no flower take root. “Come.”

— Mark Lawrence

176. “I have read that the Builders made toys that could play chess. Toys, as small as the silver bishop in my hand, that could defeat any player, taking no time to select moves that undid even the best minds amongst their makers. The bishop made a satisfying click when tapped to the board. I beat out a little rhythm, wondering if any point remained in playing a game that toys could own. If we couldn’t find a better game then perhaps the mechanical minds the Builders left behind would always win.”

— Mark Lawrence

177. “Words are steps along a path: the important thing is to get where you’re going. You can play by all manner of rules,... but you’ll get there quicker if you pick the most certain route. Lies are complex things. Best not to bother thinking in terms of truth or lie-let necessity be your mother... and invent!”

— Mark Lawrence

178. “Magic always struck me as hard and dangerous work... not that there are any words you can put before “work” that makes it sound attractive. Certainly not “dangerous” or “hard.”

— Mark Lawrence

179. “Whilst running away is a great strategy, a good coward always takes the unfair advantage.”

— Mark Lawrence

180. “The way I’d put it,” said Makin, “is that Rike can’t make an omelet without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails as a necklace.”

— Mark Lawrence

181. “The hardest lesson I ever learned was that every bad thing you see a friend do to someone else they will some day do to you.”

— Mark Lawrence

182. “There’s a purity to the struggle to reach a peak. You leave your world behind and take only what you need. For a creature like me there is nothing closer to redemption.”

— Mark Lawrence

183. “If the sins of the flesh ever got old I didn’t ever want enough years on me to know it.”

— Mark Lawrence

184. “A lie can run deeper than strength or wisdom.”

— Mark Lawrence

185. “A man can drown in shades of grey.”

— Mark Lawrence

186. “Pain can stay the same while you change around it. And, like a thumb of constant size, what it blocks out depends on how close it gets to you. At arm’s length a thumb obscures a small fragment of the day. Held close enough to your eye it can blind you to everything that matters, relegating the world to a periphery.”

— Mark Lawrence

187. “I was more ass than assassin.”

— Mark Lawrence

188. “Always take the money,” Hennan offered with a small grin.”

— Mark Lawrence

189. “I call it howling but it was screaming. Man, dog, horse. With enough hurt we all sound the same.”

— Mark Lawrence

190. “The beauty and the silliness, and how one piece fitted with the next, and how we all dance around each other in a kind of terror, too petrified of stepping on each other’s toes to understand that we are at least for a brief time getting to dance and should be enjoying the hell out of it.”

— Mark Lawrence

191. “And that’s how it is in this world, boy. Start a tale, just a little tale that should fade and die – take your eye off it for just a moment and when you turn back it’s grown big enough to grab you up in its teeth and shake you. That’s how it is. All our 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

192. “Most men have at least one redeeming feature. Finding one for Brother Rike requires a stretch. Is ‘big’ a redeeming feature?”

— Mark Lawrence

193. “It’s not like me to brood on the past. I’m not comfortable with uncomfortable truths. I prefer to round off the edges and corners until I have something worth keeping.”

— Mark Lawrence

194. “Nothing paralyses a man so well as choice.”

— Mark Lawrence

195. “Those that burn short burn bright. The shortest lives can cast the longest shadows.”

— Mark Lawrence

196. “That’s what happens when you stop. Take a rest and the world catches up with you. Lesson in life – keep moving.”

— Mark Lawrence

197. “And there it is, proof if proof were needed, that though God may mould the clay and fashion some of us hale, some strong, some beautiful, inside we make ourselves, from foolish things, breakable, fragile things:.”

— Mark Lawrence

198. “We’re fashioned by our sorrows – not by joy – they are the undercurrent, the refrain. Joy is fleeting.”

— Mark Lawrence

199. “You look different,” Snorri said. “I think ‘even more handsome’ was the phrase you were looking for.”

— Mark Lawrence

200. “Strangely it was social embarrassment that kept me from crying my eyes out, shouting at the injustice of it, kicking tables over: the idea that the strangers to either side might have heard my diagnosis and even now be listening and silently judging me. How terribly British.”

— Mark Lawrence