Top 450 Mark Lawrence Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “Nostalgia is the best and the worst feeling – complex – nothing has the ability to so delight and wound us simultaneously, except perhaps for love.”

— Mark Lawrence

403. “Memory is the scaffold on which we assemble ourselves.”

— Mark Lawrence

404. “He’d read that love was when the hurts of another became yours, every bit as sharp, even if you didn’t understand them.”

— Mark Lawrence

405. “And what was Ara if not a piece of her heart?”

— Mark Lawrence

406. “Would it really take a vengeful god to bring them all to ruin, or was it simply a case of handing sharp knives to toddlers and waiting for the bleeding to start?”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

408. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

410. “They expect her to run. They know she will run. And she does. But at them.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

413. “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

414. “I already told you: we choose sides with our gut. The words are to make us feel better afterwards.”

— Mark Lawrence

415. “To sow knowing that you will not reap is an old kind of love, and love has always been the best key for unlocking the future.”

— Mark Lawrence

416. “There are few journeys more painful than going back to a place you haven’t seen in many years. If you are lucky, it will have changed beyond recognition and, by having done so, will allow you to ignore the still larger changes in yourself. No Returns: A Librarian’s Tale, by Ook Longarm.”

— Mark Lawrence

417. “People fasten on to hatred for reasons that have little or nothing to do with fairness or reason. And neither fairness nor reason is a tool that will prise them free from it.”

— Mark Lawrence

418. “Choosing a book should be a private business, conducted in the secrecy of the aisles, not on display for strangers’ judgment.”

— Mark Lawrence

419. “Yaz shrugged. ‘People get like that if they live long enough to turn grey. They think they’ve seen it all and have answers for everyone. But they’re so distant from living life that they forget that we all have different paths.”

— Mark Lawrence

420. “We’re all the story we tell about ourselves, silly.” Another wave rocked them. “That’s all anyone ever is – the story they tell, and the stories told about them. Fiction captures more than facts do. That’s why the library keeps it. It’s the most important part of our memories.”

— Mark Lawrence

421. “Sometimes he wondered about that. About how a man might retrace his steps and yet still not return to the place he’d come from.”

— Mark Lawrence

422. “The alphabet of scars exists so that those lessons need not be carved into our flesh a second time. Holocaust, author unknown.”

— Mark Lawrence

423. “After all, forward time travel is just an advanced form of waiting.”

— Mark Lawrence

424. “Language is like a tree,” Logaris said apropos of nothing, his deep voice descending from on high as if declaiming a favourite poem. “It grows and changes too slowly for us to see, and yet we know that it was once a seed small enough to be lost in the breadth of our palm, and we know that one day it will topple and die and rot away.”

— Mark Lawrence

425. “We are victims of our first friendships. They are the foundations of us. Each anchors us to our past. The blows that drive those nails home are randomly struck, but they echo down all our days even so.”

— Mark Lawrence

426. “The library can make sure that nobody has a good excuse for forgetting what happens and striving to prevent repetition. But it cannot stop even that. People have to want to know. I wish I could tell you that free and easy access to information solves these problems – it doesn’t. People find their own wells of poison to drink from.”

— Mark Lawrence

427. “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

428. “He sighed and, after a long pause, admitted, “I worry.” “You seem to have summed up your existence in two words, Arpix.”

— Mark Lawrence

429. “The person who finished writing it was very different from the one who started it.”

— Mark Lawrence

430. “It turns out that the most important lesson that history teaches us is that history should not teach us. Lessons should be learned, not taught. Wisdom has to be earned, and no number of words can wrap the gift of knowledge sufficiently to keep it safe from misuse. The definition of madness is repeating the same action and expecting a different result.”

— Mark Lawrence

431. “So we’re literally changing the course of history?’ Demus shrugged. ‘Over a girl?’ ‘There’s a better reason?”

— Mark Lawrence

432. “We don’t even know what kansas is anymore.” Mayland said that in the histories some held it to be a real place, some a mythical city, and others still an enlightened state of being. Evar leaned towards agreeing with those who thought it was a state.”

— Mark Lawrence

433. “I’m a good runner any day of the week. Scared shitless I’m world class.”

— Mark Lawrence

434. “There’s nothing brave in committing to a fight – you just need to understand that there’s a scarier outcome waiting for you if you don’t. Hesitation’s the killer.”

— Mark Lawrence

435. “One fine day Truth met with Lies upon a mountainside with all of Hantalon spread beneath them: field, and town, and city stretching to the sparkle of the sea. With a disapproving frown, Truth asked of Lies how many she had slain. And true to her nature she answered with a lie. “More than you, brother.” The Basics of Deductive Logic, by I. P. Franchise.”

— Mark Lawrence

436. “Hurts don’t stop, but they fade into shadows of what they were. That’s sad. That something so vital, something that bit you so deep, can be eroded by time into a story that almost seems like it happened to someone else. Any hurt.”

— Mark Lawrence

437. “One of the earliest philosophers told us you can’t step into the same river twice. The library taught me you can’t read the same book twice either – you’re the river.”

— Mark Lawrence

438. “Reading is a dangerous sport, never more so than when we turn the page and find ourselves there among the lines. Blunt Instruments, by Joshua Semple.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

440. “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

441. “The innocent believe that there are boundaries over which our kind will not step. The complacent understand that there are walls of decency and conscience safeguarding our daily lives. Thick stone walls mortared with faith.”

— Mark Lawrence

442. “When your sole travelling companion is a seven-foot maniac with an axe, it can he unsettling to hear that he’s starting to believe the devil that whispers in his ear when the sun sets.”

— Mark Lawrence

443. “We humans are herd animals. When several gather to browse in one spot, more will come. Few places offer more eloquent testimony to this fact than does a library, wherein our focus ensures some few books scarcely touch the shelves from the moments of their binding until the day they fall apart from overuse. Whiles all around, in sullen silence, the unloved show their spines in endless rows, aching for the touch that never comes.”

— Mark Lawrence

444. “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

445. “War is often described as long periods of boredom, punctuated by moments of terror. A description that is functionally identical to many people’s lives.”

— Mark Lawrence

446. “Years crawl by but once they get behind you in a big old stack, it’s amazing how they seem to have done it in the blink of an eye.”

— Mark Lawrence

447. “And, in the end, Arpix had come to the conclusion that she was the breath that he hadn’t understood was required to keep him from suffocating.”

— Mark Lawrence

448. “The wilful ignorance of a people who know in their secret hearts that they’re being lied to and listen anyway because to them the lies are sweet.”

— Mark Lawrence

449. “None of it makes much sense, but what it’s hard to argue with is that there are a hundred and seven nudists heading back through time in a cave under a field not far outside Bristol, and I’m one of them.”

— Mark Lawrence

450. “People don’t want truth. They say that they do but what they mean is that they want the truth to agree with them.”

— Mark Lawrence