Top 450 Mark Lawrence Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Steady progress. That was the Ictha way. Any task could be overcome by steady, unrelenting progress.”

— Mark Lawrence

402. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

405. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

408. “Your eyes might occupy only a tiny fraction of what you present to the world but they are what each stranger seeks when they meet you, as if needing reassurance concerning the person that watches through them.”

— Mark Lawrence

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

415. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

417. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “If you love someone, let them go. Except when that would be really stupid, like in a crowd and they’re two and you’re their mother.”

— Mark Lawrence

424. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “Six Go On and On, by Enanald Byten.”

— Mark Lawrence

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

439. “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

440. “None of us really know what we’re here for or what we’re supposed to be doing. So, we shout out, hoping someone will hear, hoping someone will see us and reveal the great secret.”

— Mark Lawrence

441. “The mathematics of time don’t care about ‘now’, they just ask what value you want to set ‘t’ to.”

— Mark Lawrence

442. “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

443. “I hated him in the way that only someone who can’t sleep hates someone who won’t wake up can.”

— Mark Lawrence

444. “People don’t want truth. They say that they do but what they mean is that they want the truth to agree with them. Take ninety-nine books that say one thing and one that says the opposite. If that opposite was what the customer was hoping to hear, they’ll put their stock in the single volume. In this manner we learn more regarding human nature from closed books than from anything that might be written within them.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

446. “She felt her devils moving beneath her habit, their voices crying out for blood, and she found herself in agreement. The Book of the Ancestor says that for everything there is a season. This was a time to reap. A time for death. A time to die.”

— Mark Lawrence

447. “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

448. “Some things when set in motion by the lightest touch cannot be stopped by a whole army.”

— Mark Lawrence

449. “Wisdom is difficult to write down, harder to find amid the ocean of the unwise, and, when found, next to impossible to learn from a page. The wisdom to use knowledge must be earned rather than given. That takes time.”

— Mark Lawrence

450. “The knowledge that he couldn’t possibly read all the books on offer put a peculiar pressure on choosing his next read.”

— Mark Lawrence