Top 400 Mark Lawrence Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Are we being stupid here?” Ara frowned at her broken staff. “There’s a monster down there we know nothing about, and Jula has a frying pan.”

— Mark Lawrence

352. “With sufficient gravitas even the wildest of lies can be made to sound plausible.”

— Mark Lawrence

353. “Man, dog, horse. With enough hurt we all sound the same.”

— Mark Lawrence

354. “I’ve never seen a man who understands so little about women and yet is so led about by them.”

— Mark Lawrence

355. “The Queen of Red watched on, with Katherine and the Silent Sister, all three of them studying me as if I were some puzzle that might be solved.”

— Mark Lawrence

356. “We’re not memories, Katherine, we’re dreams. All of us. Each part of us is a dream, a nightmare of blood and vomit and boredom and fear. And when we wake up – we die.”

— Mark Lawrence

357. “Men who’ve made choices always feel they own their destiny. Few ever think to ask who shaped and offered up those choices. Who dangles the carrot they think they’ve chosen to follow.”

— Mark Lawrence

358. “Courtesy costs nothing, which makes it the ideal gift when you’re as cheap as I am.”

— Mark Lawrence

359. “That was just how we spoke. Every conversation a game of poker, every line a bet or a raise, a bluff or a call.”

— Mark Lawrence

360. “Mathematics is its own language. The language of everything. It doesn’t need someone to explain it. It explains itself and leaves almost no room for ambiguity.”

— Mark Lawrence

361. “Pretty much everything exploded.”

— Mark Lawrence

362. “I turned to the guard. “Keep her here, Rodrick. Unless she comes up with a plan to destroy the remainder of the enemy. In which case you’re to let her do it.”

— Mark Lawrence

363. “The importance of “between” is often overlooked in the hurry of getting from one place to another. In truth it is these interstitial spaces which, in their linking of this to that and of now to then, might be considered a more fundamental layer in reality’s manifold.”

— Mark Lawrence

364. “I followed but I held my tongue. I’d seen children tag after grown men throwing question after question, but I had put childhood aside. My questions could wait, at least until the rain stopped.”

— Mark Lawrence

365. “Your death has not been waiting for your arrival at the appointed hour: it has, for all the years of your life, been racing towards you with the fierce velocity of time’s arrow.”

— Mark Lawrence

366. “I had left that boy behind in my wake, just as we all abandon the children we were. Slow or fast, the years pull us apart from them, sometimes in one savage yank, sometimes by degrees, like the hour hand of the clock, too stealthy for us to perceive its motion and yet when you look again it is no longer where you left it.”

— Mark Lawrence

367. “Old dogs can teach us new tricks. An old dog shuffles on, relentlessly happy, still interested in the world. Even when they’re too worn out to run it’s still there – no bitterness, no regret, no looking back, just on to the next thing with amiable confusion. Dogs are nothing but good.”

— Mark Lawrence

368. “It unsettled her how the same words could mean such different things to different people. How it might be possible for two sets of eyes to witness the same events and later give accounts at odds with each other.”

— Mark Lawrence

369. “For all but the most damaged of us, doubt is the other side of that coin. Success, even if earned through hard toil, comes hand in hand with the belief that one is an impostor, admitted to an inner sanctum by mistake and without invitation.”

— Mark Lawrence

370. “The library is both the tree and the apple. It offers not knowledge of good and evil but knowledge for good or evil.”

— Mark Lawrence

371. “Miana had been irritable all day in the carriage, but then if I’d swallowed a whole baby and it insisted on kicking the hell out of my insides I might be less than my normal tolerant self.”

— Mark Lawrence

372. “Without guilt we would all be monsters. And memory is the ink with which we list our crimes.”

— Mark Lawrence

373. “A good book invites the reader in,′ Livira said. ‘The writer’s only half the equation.”

— Mark Lawrence

374. “All of us steal our lives. A little here, a little there. Some of it given, most of it taken. We wear ourselves like a coat of many patches, fraying at the edges, in constant repair. While we shore up one belief, we let go another. We are the stories we tell to ourselves. Nothing more.”

— Mark Lawrence

375. “Throw any single life away as if it holds no meaning and how will your own life be valued thereafter?”

— Mark Lawrence

376. “Life in general, and human intelligence in particular, had once seemed an inconsequential complication in the world of physics; but the more we learned, the more intelligence had revealed itself to be a fundamental mystery at the heart of everything, deeper than the dances of stars and galaxies.”

— Mark Lawrence

377. “Sometimes all your words are the wrong shape and none of them will fit into the silence left when the conversation pauses.”

— Mark Lawrence

378. “Yute told me a great writer once said that fiction was easy – all you have to do is sit in front of a blank page and bleed.” Livira snorted. “Yute said there was a people who took that literally. They wrote everything in blood, which he felt was trying too hard, but perhaps a good way to conserve paper and make sure you get to the point quickly.”

— Mark Lawrence

379. “There’s something alien in a goat’s eye, something not seen in dog or horse or bird. It’s the rectangular pupil. As if they’ve climbed out of hell or fallen from the moon.”

— Mark Lawrence

380. “The optimist sets themself up for disappointment. I’m just aiming for a little realism.”

— Mark Lawrence

381. “A wise man told me that history will not stop us repeating our mistakes, but will at least make us ashamed of doing so.”

— Mark Lawrence

382. “When you sell someone a book you give them ownership of something without it being taken away from anyone else.”

— Mark Lawrence

383. “Livira had come to appreciate that an ocean of knowledge is apt to drown you long before it educates you.”

— Mark Lawrence

384. “It’s not until you’re broken that you find your sharpest edge.”

— Mark Lawrence

385. “It’s always the books you don’t have that call to you, you know that. Not the ones on your shelf. They can wait.”

— Mark Lawrence

386. “Many objects are an inherent invitation. A sharp edge invites you to cut. A coin wishes to be spent. A sword begs for violence. A door requires that you try to open it.”

— Mark Lawrence

387. “Always kick a man when he’s down, I say. It’s the best chance you’ll get.”

— Mark Lawrence

388. “Ruli spoke with the total conviction she reserved for all guesswork.”

— Mark Lawrence

389. “With an endless library,” Livira muttered, “if you search long enough, you can find a book that agrees with just about any opinion you have.”

— Mark Lawrence

390. “I’d rather spend a year making new memories than a thousand wandering around in the same old ones.”

— Mark Lawrence

391. “Nothing is as cruel as a righteous man. She had been righteous in her time.”

— Mark Lawrence

392. “There’s a special connection between consciousness and time. Einstein said, ‘Time is an illusion’, and the great Douglas Adams had even greater doubts about lunchtime.”

— Mark Lawrence

393. “All books, no matter their binding, will fall to dust. The stories they carry may last longer. They might outlive the paper, the library, even the language in which they were first written.”

— Mark Lawrence

394. “She was used to being told not to ask questions. Adults didn’t like it. But she had always thought that they knew the answers and that they simply found it too irritating to supply them to a child on demand.”

— Mark Lawrence

395. “There was no wheel of course, no golden gates, no hill, no dry lands. Just two brothers trying to right a wrong.”

— Mark Lawrence

396. “Steady progress. That was the Ictha way. Any task could be overcome by steady, unrelenting progress.”

— Mark Lawrence

397. “She knew armor when she saw it, and who wears such heavy armor if they are not vulnerable without it?”

— Mark Lawrence

398. “The universe doesn’t care about time. We care about time. Because we remember.”

— Mark Lawrence

399. “Omens are difficult and open to interpretation but if the oracle that touches your newborn dies moments later, frothing at the mouth, it is hard even with a mother’s love to think it a good sign.”

— Mark Lawrence

400. “She was clean, fed, chosen, and special. And it was all her fault. And even if the library contained a million books and each book a million words, there couldn’t be among all that wisdom a single line that would convince her otherwise.”

— Mark Lawrence