Top 400 Mark Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The important thing in running away is not how fast you run but simply that you run faster than the next man.”

— Mark Lawrence

202. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

205. “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

206. “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

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

— 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. “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

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

213. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

215. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

228. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

238. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

240. “If it offends you. Stop me.”

— Mark Lawrence

241. “A consequence of boredom is that a man is forced to look either to the future or the past, or sideways into his imagination.”

— Mark Lawrence

242. “The greatest threat to any faith is not other faiths or beliefs but the corruption and division of its own message.”

— Mark Lawrence

243. “Nights spent on mountains are not to be recommended. Nights where the dark is full of the sounds of dead men trying to climb up to where you’re shivering under thin blankets, less so.”

— Mark Lawrence

244. “Superstition though does tend to have a sharp end, and I didn’t want to find myself impaled on it.”

— Mark Lawrence

245. “When you take a woman away from her man, what you get is a woman who can be taken away from her man.”

— Mark Lawrence

246. “Murder the wrong man and he’ll kill you.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

248. “Anger had its place, it was a weapon not to be neglected, but so did patience, and Nona decided that control lay in deciding which to use and when. She.”

— Mark Lawrence

249. “Men like to talk about themselves and their achievements. Nona knew that much about men even if she was little.”

— Mark Lawrence

250. “It being Sunday, the cook prepared a special treat for us. Snails in garlic and wine, with saffron rice. The snails came from the local cliffs. A big variety as thick as a child’s arm. But let’s face it, snails are just slugs with a hat on.”

— Mark Lawrence