Top 400 Mark Lawrence Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

207. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

209. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

212. “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

213. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

215. “If it offends you. Stop me.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

217. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

230. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

241. “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

242. “She’ll never love you better than she loves her own children.”

— Mark Lawrence

243. “Yes, I should grow up, and yes, I will, but there’s time for that tomorrow. Today is for living.”

— Mark Lawrence

244. “Those novices are my friends and I would die for them. I would face a terror for them that I haven’t the courage to stand against on my own behalf.”

— Mark Lawrence

245. “Snow makes a soft bed, but no man wakes from it. That was the wisdom of the North.”

— Mark Lawrence

246. “I think you need to have lived more to truly know a man’s heart. You need to have made more transactions in life to know the worth of the coin you spend so freely.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

248. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

250. “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