Top 400 Mark Lawrence Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “All the best secrets are told at night.”

— Mark Lawrence

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

308. “You can look after this knight’s soul, Father. The sins of the flesh though – they’re all mine.”

— Mark Lawrence

309. “You have my advice. Carry it with you. It won’t slow you down.”

— Mark Lawrence

310. “The stories of our lives don’t behave themselves; they don’t have clear beginnings, and even death isn’t a clear end. We just do what we can, we take what kindness and joy we find along the way, we ride the rapids as best we’re able.”

— Mark Lawrence

311. “I felt better mounted. God gave us horses so we could run away faster.”

— Mark Lawrence

312. “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

313. “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

314. “If I think back on my successes, such as they are, they come as often as not from the simple exercise of putting two disparate facts together and making a weapon of them.”

— Mark Lawrence

315. “It seemed inconceivable that such an inferno, lofting embers into the heavens and scorching the clouds themselves, could have started with the tiny spark struck from my flint and nursed by my breath. Still, perhaps that’s all lives are, all the world is, a collision of vast conflagrations, each sparked from nothing.”

— Mark Lawrence

316. “I held a world in my hand, and however I shook it, however the pieces fell, in whatever new patterns, nothing changed.”

— Mark Lawrence

317. “I’ve been told that conscience speaks in a small voice at the back of the mind, clear to some, to others muffled and easy to ignore.”

— Mark Lawrence

318. “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

319. “Is this going to be one of those times when you pretend not to have a plan until the last moment?’ Makin asked. ‘And then turn out to really not have one?”

— Mark Lawrence

320. “If you must run, have something to run toward, so it feels less like cowardice. And if you must run to something, why not make it the empire throne? Something suitably distant and unobtainable. After all, getting everything you wish for is nearly as dire a curse as having all your dreams come true.”

— Mark Lawrence

321. “Darkness is patient, always waiting for its chance, and swift to take it.”

— Mark Lawrence

322. “Bollockeration.”

— Mark Lawrence

323. “The bladder-pipe, a local Highlands speciality, is to music what warthogs are to mathematics. Largely unconnected.”

— Mark Lawrence

324. “You may be rocks but humanity is the tide and you only have to stand upon the sand to see how that contest concludes.”

— Mark Lawrence

325. “There is a tendency for characters who march on past their sell-by date to become caricatures of themselves – to tread the same ground, growing more stale with each step.”

— Mark Lawrence

326. “Her blood sang with the violence.”

— Mark Lawrence

327. “That’s my secret and my shame. I’m Nona Grey, war is in my veins, and the screams of my enemies are music to me.”

— Mark Lawrence

328. “He broke off his explanation, seeing in his daughter’s eyes the exact moment that a child first understands there are limits on what her parents can do, rather than just limits on what they choose to do.”

— Mark Lawrence

329. “The fight matters. But in the end it is never truly won or lost, and victory lies in discovering that we are bigger than it is.”

— Mark Lawrence

330. “Men are many and take strength as a challenge, difference as a crime.”

— Mark Lawrence

331. “Maybe I could. Maybe I couldn’t. I wasn’t going to, and that was the main thing.”

— Mark Lawrence

332. “The things that time wants to keep, it buries.”

— Mark Lawrence

333. “Never go questing without a bit of rope, at least that’s how the stories have it.”

— Mark Lawrence

334. “Brother Gains wasn’t the cook because he was good at cooking. He was just bad at everything else.”

— Mark Lawrence

335. “All our lives draw in toward a single point and time, not too many miles or years from this room. A point in history when the emperor will either save us or damn us. All we can do is buy him the time he needs – and the price must be paid in blood.”

— Mark Lawrence

336. “There are no useless skills, girl. Only talents that have yet to find an application.”

— Mark Lawrence

337. “I’m an amiable drunk. Given enough time I always reach the point where every man is my brother.”

— Mark Lawrence

338. “Have your own opinions spoken back to you by someone you despise and you will likely begin to find fault.”

— Mark Lawrence

339. “Churchmen, eh? Love one minute, forgiveness the next, and then it’s eternity on fire.”

— Mark Lawrence

340. “They say that you can never go back – and that’s true. We change and so the places we return to will not seem the same.”

— Mark Lawrence

341. “Anything I had to say seemed shallow beside the depth of his grief. Words are awkward tools at best, too blunt for delicate tasks.”

— Mark Lawrence

342. “Cold has its own taste. It tastes of a bitten tongue. It coils around you, a living thing, a beast that means to kill you, not with wrath, not with tooth nor claw, but with the mercy of surrender, with the kindness of letting you go gentle into the long night after such a burden of pain and misery.”

— Mark Lawrence

343. “I would have saved them.” But the lie tastes rotten on my tongue. Would anything have held William from me? Would anything have held my mother back. Anything? All bonds can be slipped, all thorns torn free. It’s simply a matter of pain, and of what you’re prepared to lose.”

— Mark Lawrence

344. “When you fight among subjects you are a figure, a form, an idea.”

— Mark Lawrence

345. “Four years and everything was the same, except me.”

— Mark Lawrence

346. “When I was last here’ – he swung his arm at the rock and ice – ’all this was fields.”

— Mark Lawrence

347. “How do you stand the pain?” I ask. “It’s just pain.” He shrugs. His white cloak, smeared with dust, sticks to him as though he is wet beneath it.”

— Mark Lawrence

348. “He died when I was twelve. He also had cancer, but an oncoming train cured him.”

— Mark Lawrence

349. “Some truths you can’t speak. Some truths come barbed; each word would tear you inside out if you forced them from your lips. “She –.”

— Mark Lawrence

350. “I decided the best policy for the now would be to drink myself insensible and hope the morrow had better to offer. “The.”

— Mark Lawrence