Top 400 Mark Lawrence Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “Pretty much everything exploded.”

— Mark Lawrence

358. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

373. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

377. “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

378. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

387. “A parent’s grief runs deeper than words can reach, novice. We speak them to help ourselves.”

— Mark Lawrence

388. “Might we not be creating new and different demons whose most frightening trait is that they truly believe themselves to be angels?”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

390. “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

391. “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

392. “In any game of bets and forfeit the bluff was always of more importance than whatever might be written in the cards held tight against your chest.”

— Mark Lawrence

393. “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

394. “I could go with you, Lady. I could take what you offer. But who would I be then? Who would I be if I let go the wrongs that have shaped me?” “You would be happy,” she said. “Someone.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

396. “The black and white of truth blurred into grey under the relentless assault of an infinity of context, interpretation, perspectives, and opinion.”

— Mark Lawrence

397. “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

398. “Perhaps that’s all bravery was – a form of delusion.”

— Mark Lawrence

399. “The two saving graces of explosions are that from the outside they’re pretty and from the inside they’re quick.”

— Mark Lawrence

400. “For those of you who have had to wait a while for this book I provide brief catch-up notes to Book One, so that your memories may be refreshed and I can avoid the awkwardness of having to have characters tell each other things they already know for your benefit.”

— Mark Lawrence