Top 400 Mark Lawrence Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 9

151. “In the end it seems we’re just toys, easy to break and hard to mend.”

— Mark Lawrence

152. “There might not be a meaning to the world, or in it, but that does not mean that what we do has no meaning.”

— Mark Lawrence

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

156. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

178. “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

179. “I was more ass than assassin.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

181. “Give them hell.”

— Mark Lawrence

182. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

189. “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

190. “These lines are hooks, I’m fishing unknown seas.”

— Mark Lawrence

191. “Trust is the most insidious of poisons. Trust sidesteps all of your precautions.”

— Mark Lawrence

192. “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

193. “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

194. “When a course of action is forced upon you it’s best to accept it with grace and milk it for whatever you can get, right up to the moment the first opportunity to weasel out of the deal presents itself.”

— Mark Lawrence

195. “I’ve learned to wear my face as a mask, and generally I can write what I choose on it.”

— Mark Lawrence

196. “It is important, when killing a novice, to ensure you bring a force of sufficient size.”

— Mark Lawrence

197. “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

198. “Battles are all about strategy, and strategy pivots on priorities. Since my priorities were Prince Jalan, Prince Jalan, and Prince Jalan, with “looking good” a distant fourth, I took the opportunity to resume running away. I find that the main thing about success is the ability to act in the moment. A hero attacks in the moment; a good coward runs in it. The rest of the world waits for the next moment and ends up as crow food.”

— Mark Lawrence

199. “Give us everything we ask for and suddenly it’s too much.”

— Mark Lawrence

200. “Some men are too dull to feel what might happen. Others torture themselves with maybes and populate their dreams with horrors more terrible than their worst enemy could inflict upon them.”

— Mark Lawrence