Top 400 Mark Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “And they’re thieves to a man. If you shake a Rhonish hand, count your fingers afterward.”

— Mark Lawrence

252. “Giljohn stood at the cart, held by bonds of the sort that no child can see, the kind made of debt and of a bitter understanding of the world’s truths, the kind that tear at a life as you struggle against them and leave wounds that won’t heal.”

— Mark Lawrence

253. “There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything.”

— Mark Lawrence

254. “I don’t know what a bike is but it sounds painful.”

— Mark Lawrence

255. “Best she remember me as seven and not see me now.”

— Mark Lawrence

256. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

259. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

264. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

266. “A predictable warrior, no matter how talented, will end up dead sooner than a less skilled warrior who can less easily be anticipated.”

— Mark Lawrence

267. “Better a long ignoble life of shallow pleasures than a short stab at heroism, ending with a short stab. And just because one man plays another doesn’t always mean that it’s not the right direction for both of them.”

— Mark Lawrence

268. “In hospital they ask you to rate your discomfort on a scale of ten. I guess it’s the best they can come up with, but it fails to capture the nature of the beast. 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

269. “All the best secrets are told at night.”

— Mark Lawrence

270. “I wondered once if Corion had put that sickness in me, if I were the tool and he the architect of that violence and cruelty. I wondered if having taken his head, if having grown from boy to man, I would be a better person. I wondered if I might be the man the Nuban wanted me to be, the man Tutor Lundist hoped for.”

— Mark Lawrence

271. “I’ve never had much use for religion, except when it comes to swearing or begging for mercy.”

— Mark Lawrence

272. “We’re wild things us men, and when we remember it we’re at our most dangerous.”

— Mark Lawrence

273. “I try to be a fair man, to live with honour, but come against me armed and looking to take my life, and you will not walk away again.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

275. “When the person you hit doesn’t have the grace to fall over, it’s generally best to have a backup plan.”

— Mark Lawrence

276. “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

277. “Never drink small if it’s at someone else’s expense.”

— Mark Lawrence

278. “Watch out for that effelant. They’re green and like the taste of Vikings.”

— Mark Lawrence

279. “Weakness is a contagion, one breath of it can corrupt a man whole and entire. Now though, even with all the evil in me, I don’t know if I could teach such lessons to a son of mine.”

— Mark Lawrence

280. “It’s when your power is taken, or given, away that you discover who your friends are, brother. There’s a lesson for us all in that.”

— Mark Lawrence

281. “A practised liar gets good at noticing the failings of those with less practice.”

— Mark Lawrence

282. “Some arguments require a knife if you’re to cut to the quick, others require the breaking of heads with a philosopher’s stone.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

284. “I’ll lick a leper’s neck before I take a lung-full o’ your stench, Brother Row.”

— Mark Lawrence

285. “Oh come on, I just killed the fecking Pope. You are going to attack me, aren’t you?”

— Mark Lawrence

286. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

288. “Her death didn’t feel real yet. Nona stood there, casting no shadow, and found she could feel nothing for her friend. Some emotions are like that, too big to be seen from within, like the ice patterns, written across empty miles, which make sense only from a great height. She slumped, staggering as weariness caught up with her. She would find that distance in time, and there would be sorrow enough to make the dead weep, and she feared it.”

— Mark Lawrence

289. “Children are like cats, only less useful and less furry.”

— Mark Lawrence

290. “A man casts a million shadows, and yet you trap him within such a singular opinion. You.”

— Mark Lawrence

291. “The cat is both alive and dead.” “Who mentioned a fecking cat?”

— Mark Lawrence

292. “Bollockeration.”

— Mark Lawrence

293. “Each hour became a process of taking a dull future and squeezing it into a dull past through the narrow slot of the moment.”

— Mark Lawrence

294. “Thorn stood without motion, for only when you are truly still can you be the centre. She stood without sound, for only silent can you listen. She stood without fear, for only the fearless can understand their peril. Hers.”

— Mark Lawrence

295. “Disguise had always come easy to him. His childhood had served him well – when your sense of self is taken it grows easier to become someone else, when you sell affection it becomes easier to both understand love and be unmoved by it.”

— Mark Lawrence

296. “Truth may often be the first casualty of war, but dignity is definitely the first casualty of disease.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

298. “The need for vengeance feels like a hunger, but there is no sating it. Instead it consumes the man that feeds it. Vengeance is taking from the world. The only cure is to give.”

— Mark Lawrence

299. “The trip from could to should is short and allows little time for reflection.”

— Mark Lawrence

300. “Still the music, the deep slow melody, the high and broken counterpoint, as if the mountains themselves had become the score, as if the glories of hidden caves and secret peaks had wrapped around the ageless majesty of the ocean and turned into the music of all men’s lives, played out by a woman’s fingers, without pause or mercy, reaching in, twisting, laying us bare.”

— Mark Lawrence