Top 450 Mark Lawrence Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Men like to talk about themselves and their achievements. Nona knew that much about men even if she was little.”

— Mark Lawrence

252. “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

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. “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

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

263. “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

264. “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

265. “All men will dig their heels in if pushed enough. All men will reach the point that they say “no” for no reason other than opposition, for no reason other than the word fits their mouth, and tastes as good as it sounds.”

— Mark Lawrence

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

269. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

271. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

277. “And they’re thieves to a man. If you shake a Rhonish hand, count your fingers afterward.”

— Mark Lawrence

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

281. “Kill her and be done.’ ‘I haven’t reached the Path in twenty years because in all that time I have never left it.’ Sister Pan glanced again at Nona. ‘Run, child. Please.”

— Mark Lawrence

282. “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

283. “Give an inch, give any single man any single inch and the next thing you hear will be, ‘One more, Jorg, one more.’ And in the end what you love will burn.”

— Mark Lawrence

284. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

292. “Never having been troubled by a conscience before, I was far from sure what to expect of one, and so when for a minute or two each day at dawn a voice began to whisper to me to be a better man, I decided the shock of recent events had finally woken mine. My conscience had a name – Baraqel. I didn’t like him much.”

— Mark Lawrence

293. “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

294. “Shame can exert as much pressure as anger.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

298. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

300. “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