Top 400 Mark Lawrence Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “These lines are hooks, I’m fishing unknown seas.”

— Mark Lawrence

202. “Violence is the language of destruction, flesh so often the subject, fragile, easy to break beyond repair, precious; what else would we burn to make the world take note?”

— Mark Lawrence

203. “Why would you do that?” I asked as he gasped. “Why would you hand me a lever to your pain?” I walked forward, bending the finger down, and he backed before me, into the crowd of his supporters, crying out, bowing low to lessen the sharp angle at which I held the digit.”

— Mark Lawrence

204. “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

205. “He looked once more across the ragged band before him, a family of sorts, pack rather than herd, a band of brothers who knew what lay at the core of him because they shared it, killers all. He looked down at the crimson weapons in his crimson hands and knew that moment of peace which happens when a thing surrenders to its nature.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

207. “Opera! There’s nothing like it. Except wild boars rutting. The.”

— Mark Lawrence

208. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

211. “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

212. “Pride lets a man be skewered on the point of other people’s expectations.”

— Mark Lawrence

213. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

215. “Knowledge is a rug of a certain size, and the world is larger. It’s not what remains uncovered at the edges that should worry you, rather what is swept beneath.”

— Mark Lawrence

216. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

219. “Death was kind.” He drew a sharp breath. “But no father should have to give such a kindness to his child.”

— Mark Lawrence

220. “There are no other choices for you, Prince Jalan, and when there are no choices all men are equally brave.”

— Mark Lawrence

221. “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

222. “Sixty beats of a heart would be enough. If I could hold them. Let them know I came for them no matter what stood in my way. It would be enough. Sixty beats of a heart past that door would outweigh sixty years in this world without them.”

— Mark Lawrence

223. “Killing takes space. You need to move, to advance, to withdraw, and sometimes to just plain run for it.”

— Mark Lawrence

224. “I’m only a little ashamed to say I outsprinted the boy. Old habits die hard. It’s good to be faster than what’s chasing you, but really the important thing in running away is to be faster than the slowest of those being pursued. Rule number one: be ahead of the next man. Or child.”

— Mark Lawrence

225. “Cowards make the best torturers. Cowards understand fear and they can use it. Heroes on the other hand, they make terrible torturers. They don’t see what motivates a normal man. They misunderstand everything. They can’t think of anything worse than besmirching your honour. A coward on the other hand; he’ll tie you to a chair and light a slow fire under you. I’m not a hero or a coward, but I work with what I’ve got.”

— Mark Lawrence

226. “It’s easy to come up with conspiracy theories if you only look at the evidence that supports your idea.”

— Mark Lawrence

227. “Too much cleverness can be a torment to a man, setting his wits against his faith.”

— Mark Lawrence

228. “Fear is a valuable commodity, it’s common sense compressed into its purest form.”

— Mark Lawrence

229. “It’s an odd thing to be sad about someone in death that you never really cared for in life and a thing that chooses its own moment to sneak up on you – usually.”

— Mark Lawrence

230. “Perhaps he just needed something to worry about again, so he could stop worrying.”

— Mark Lawrence

231. “The breaking of day changes all things, Snorri. Nothing endures beyond the count of the sun. Pile a sufficient weight of mornings upon a thing and it will change. Even the rocks themselves will not outlast the morning.”

— Mark Lawrence

232. “Questions for questions. You’re a man who’s spent time at court.”

— Mark Lawrence

233. “I’ve become good at finding crumbs of comfort. Sometimes they’re all you have to eat.”

— Mark Lawrence

234. “I should warn you that I’m not taken with horoscopes and such,” I told her. She licked her lips again and said nothing. “If you must know, I’m a goat,” I said. “That’s right, a fecking goat. There’s a whole nation of people behind the East Wall who say I was born in the year of the goat. I’ve no time for any system that has me as a goat. I don’t care how ancient their civilization is.”

— Mark Lawrence

235. “They could speak now, as adults, not separated by that gulf between a child’s ignorance and a grown-up’s sorrows.”

— Mark Lawrence

236. “You would think it best to save your breath for running, but I often find screaming helps.”

— Mark Lawrence

237. “The world is shaped by mankind’s desires and fears. A war of hope against dread, waged upon a substrate that man himself made malleable though he has long forgotten how. All men and all men’s works stand on feet of clay, waiting to be formed and reformed, forged by fear into monsters from the dark core of each soul, waiting to rend the world asunder.”

— Mark Lawrence

238. “Great emotion, it turns out, is a fire, and like a fire it needs fuel. Unfed it dies down to a hot and banked glow, ready to ignite again but leaving space for other matters.”

— Mark Lawrence

239. “Sometimes the world slows and you notice every small thing, as if you stood between two beats of eternity’s heart. It seemed to me I had felt something similar before, with Corion, with Sageous, even Jane. The air hung heavy with the metallic scent of rain. I wondered: if I stood out there, in the flood, would the rain wrap a grey life and make it shine? Should I stand, arms spread, and raise my face? Let it wash me clean. Or did my stains run too deep?”

— Mark Lawrence

240. “Climb a mountain, see the world from its highest point and a new man will climb down.”

— Mark Lawrence

241. “Nothing is as cruel as a righteous man.”

— Mark Lawrence

242. “Some natural disasters were preferable to the sorts that people could wreak upon each other.”

— Mark Lawrence

243. “But now I thought of Father, and it felt good to know I could still feel fear.”

— Mark Lawrence

244. “If it offends you. Stop me.”

— Mark Lawrence

245. “A sensible man may fear certain possibilities, but don’t let fear turn possibility into certainty.”

— Mark Lawrence

246. “There is an unwritten rule of tube travel, understood instinctively by every Londoner from young schoolboy to doddering ancient. You pretend it’s not happening. You pretend that half a dozen strangers are not squeezing against you to a degree that is usually reserved for orgies.”

— Mark Lawrence

247. “We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next.”

— Mark Lawrence

248. “In fact, if they’d just leave you to it, an eternity alone in the dark can be a welcome alternative to the business of living.”

— Mark Lawrence

249. “These were bankers we were talking about, and I owed taxes. They’d hunt me to the ends of the earth!”

— Mark Lawrence

250. “Genuine surprise is a great help when faced with an unwelcome duty. Of course, when it’s the paying of debts you’re forgetting, that can lead to broken fingers. And worse. I guess it’s a form of lying – lying to oneself. And I’m very good at falsehoods. They often say the best liars half-believe their lies – which makes me the very best because if I repeat a lie often enough I can end up believing it entirely, no half measures involved!”

— Mark Lawrence