Top 400 Mark Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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. “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

204. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

216. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

225. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

229. “If it offends you. Stop me.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

231. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

239. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

241. “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

242. “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

243. “I suspect most teenage boys could win the hundred metres in an attempt to outdistance parental embarrassment.”

— Mark Lawrence

244. “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

245. “Most of what a man is has been written by the time his beard starts to prickle. A babe is made of maybes. There are few crimes worse than the ending of something before its time.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

247. “All leaves must fall in time, she had said. The lives we lived fall away from us, but something remains, something that is part of the tree.”

— Mark Lawrence

248. “Angry at being angry – there’s a worm that will eat its tail and no mistake. I should have Oroborus on my family crest.”

— Mark Lawrence

249. “I took the Nuban’s bow. I didn’t trust the midget to be able to run down any thieves, and besides, I might want to shoot a circus clown or two. Just for laughs.”

— Mark Lawrence

250. “What made my loss, my pain, any more important than everyone else’s.”

— Mark Lawrence