Top 400 Mark Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

174. “I was more ass than assassin.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

177. “Give them hell.”

— Mark Lawrence

178. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

186. “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

187. “Anything that happens without witnesses never really happened at all.”

— Mark Lawrence

188. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

190. “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

191. “The important thing in running away is not how fast you run but simply that you run faster than the next man.”

— Mark Lawrence

192. “The pain became my enemy. More than the Count Renar, more than my father’s bartering with lives he should have held more precious than crown, or glory, or Jesu on the cross.”

— Mark Lawrence

193. “It’s always better to sit on your dignity in private than to stand on it in public.”

— Mark Lawrence

194. “It cannot be helped.” Gorgoth’s hands closed into massive fists. “It’s in his dena.” “His dinner?”

— Mark Lawrence

195. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

197. “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

198. “I saw the pity in him. A part of me wanted to take it, wanted to tell him how I’d struggled against those hooks, how I’d watched William die. A part of me longed to lay it all down, that weight I carried, the acid pain of memory, the corrosion of hate. Lundist.”

— Mark Lawrence

199. “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

200. “Thorn carried in each limb every hour of her training, every day and year bound into the muscle of her arms, written along the length of her legs, beaten into the hardness of stomach and thigh. She knew five dozen ways to kill, she knew them with a lover’s intimacy, and in the execution perhaps lust also played its role – for what is lust but a hunger? And hunger must be fed.”

— Mark Lawrence