Top 400 Mark Lawrence Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “But when we’re left to our own devices it’s not long before someone, often greedy for power and influence, takes it upon themselves to change the Ancestor’s teachings, just a little bit, but in a way that makes that person more important or special or allows them privilege.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

404. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

406. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

416. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

418. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

420. “All of us have a shell, a skin between us and the world that we have to break each time we speak to it. Sometimes I wished mine were thinner.”

— Mark Lawrence

421. “I had only one man who I couldn’t order, who at the very last would twist my head off rather than obey against his instinct. Everyone needs somebody like that around sometimes.”

— Mark Lawrence

422. “We are victims of our first friendships. They are the foundations of us. Each anchors us to our past.”

— Mark Lawrence

423. “What saves us all are the deeds of fools as often as the acts of the wise.”

— Mark Lawrence

424. “Men who are certain of everything – well, perhaps they’re not men at all.”

— Mark Lawrence

425. “Hope,’ said Demus, ’is an essential tool in any torturer’s kit bag. Hope is the thing that we will torture ourselves with after he’s knocked off and gone home for the night.”

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

427. “A man cannot take on new burdens of debt at every turn or he will buckle beneath the weight and be unable to move.”

— Mark Lawrence

428. “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

429. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

431. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence

437. “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

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

— Mark Lawrence