Top 400 Mark Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

260. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

262. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

266. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

268. “Nostalgia is a drug, a knife. Against young skin it carries a dull edge, but time will teach you that nostalgia cuts – and that it’s a blade we cannot keep from applying to our own flesh.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

270. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

273. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

277. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

282. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

284. “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

285. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

288. “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

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

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

— Mark Lawrence

293. “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

294. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

296. “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

297. “I kept my voice calm. It wasn’t hard, I was calm. Anger carries less horror with it, men understand anger. It promises resolution; maybe bloody resolution, but swift.”

— Mark Lawrence

298. “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

299. “I warn you, Captain, God crafted these creatures for three things only. Passing wind from the rear end, passing wind from the front end, and spitting. They spit stomach acid so tell your men, and don’t let anyone venture into the hold with a naked flame or you may find yourself the master of a marvelous collection of floating splinters. Also, we’ll all drown.”

— Mark Lawrence

300. “Those that burn short burn bright. The shortest lives can cast the longest shadows.”

— Mark Lawrence