Mark Lawrence Quotes

We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretense of understanding. We paper over the voids of our comprehension with science and religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across the surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us.The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man’s control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.
Mark Lawrence
A sensible man may fear certain possibilities, but don’t let fear turn possibility into certainty.
Mark Lawrence
Keep still and your troubles find you. I might not have known much about the unborn, but I sure as hell knew about running!
Mark Lawrence
You would think it best to save your breath for running, but I often find screaming helps.
Mark Lawrence
It’s always better to sit on your dignity in private than to stand on it in public.
Mark Lawrence
I can help you, Jorge. I can give you back your self. I can give you your will.' He held out his hand, palm open. 'Free will has to be taken,' I said.
Mark Lawrence
Sometimes the only option is to raise the stakes, to throw yourself the other way, to force your opponent further down the path they've chosen, further than they might want to go.
Mark Lawrence
Those were great big angry men with sharp swords actually wanting to cut pieces off me. It’s not until you’ve seen a red gaping wound and all the complex little bits inside a man all broken up and sliced open, and known that they weren’t ever getting back together again, and vomited your last two meals over the rocks . . . it’s not until then that you understand the business of swords properly and, if you’re a sensible man you vow to have nothing to do with it ever again.
Mark Lawrence
We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.
Mark Lawrence
Nothing can be cut away. Even the worst of our memories is part of the foundation that keeps us in the world.
Mark Lawrence
It was a defeat, resorting to crude threats in a game of subtlety, but sometimes one must sacrifice a battle to win the war.
Mark Lawrence
You can win the victories you seek, Jorg. But only if you find better reasons to want them.
Mark Lawrence
Gomst's mouth framed a 'no', but every other muscle in him said 'yes'. You'd think priests would be better liars, what with their jobs and all.
Mark Lawrence
...and an edge that could cut a truth from a lie.
Mark Lawrence
It's shame that gets us killed. Shame is the anchor, the heaviest burden to carry from the battlefield. Fortunately shame was an affliction I'd never suffered from.
Mark Lawrence
Battles are all about strategy, and strategy pivots on priorities. Since my priorities were Prince Jalan, Prince Jalan, and Prince Jalan, with “looking good” a distant fourth, I took the opportunity to resume running away. I find that the main thing about success is the ability to act in the moment. A hero attacks in the moment; a good coward runs in it. The rest of the world waits for the next moment and ends up as crow food.
Mark Lawrence
Never having been troubled by a conscience before, I was far from sure what to expect of one, and so when for a minute or two each day at dawn a voice began to whisper to me to be a better man, I decided the shock of recent events had finally woken mine. My conscience had a name— Baraqel. I didn’t like him much.
Mark Lawrence
The enemy of my enemy may be my friend … of course the friend of my friend is often a jerk.
Mark Lawrence
Better a long ignoble life of shallow pleasures than a short stab at heroism, ending with a short stab. And just because one man plays another doesn’t always mean that it’s not the right direction for both of them.
Mark Lawrence
Still, perhaps that's all lives are, all the world is, a collision of vast conflagrations, each sparked from nothing.
Mark Lawrence
For the longest time I studied revenge to the exclusion of all else. I built my first torture chamber in the dark vaults of imagination. Lying on bloody sheets in the Healing Hall I discovered doors within my mind that I’d not found before, doors that even a child of nine knows should not be opened. Doors that never close again. I threw them wide.
Mark Lawrence
At the dockside I was pleasantly surprised to find the North wasn't all hairy men in animal skins. There was also hairy women in animal skins.
Mark Lawrence
All the best secrets are told at night.
Mark Lawrence
Assassination is murder with a touch more precision. Brother Sim is precise.
Mark Lawrence
I've been known to be contrary. When something pushes me, I shove back. Even if the one doing the pushing is me. It would have been easy to gut him then and there. Satisfying. But the need was too urgent. I felt pushed.
Mark Lawrence
He broke off his explanation, seeing in his daughter's eyes the exact moment that a child first understands there are limits on what her parents can do, rather than just limits on what they choose to do. He knelt before her in a moment's silence, somewhat less than he had been just seconds before, and Emy a half step closer to the woman she would one day become.
Mark Lawrence
Perhaps I just wanted to know what it was that I wanted. Maybe that is all that growing up means.
Mark Lawrence
As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.
Mark Lawrence
Thorn stood without motion, for only when you are truly still can you be the centre. She stood without sound, for only silent can you listen. She stood without fear, for only the fearless can understand their peril.Thorn waited. Fearless as flowers, bright, fragile, open to the sky. Brave, as only those who’ve already lost can be.
Mark Lawrence
Revenge is a business of calculation, best served cold. Rescue holds more of sacrifice, suicidal danger, and all manner of other madness that should have me running in the opposite direction.
Mark Lawrence
Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you. Makes you predictable, makes you weak.
Mark Lawrence
We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretence of understanding. We paper over the voids in our comprehension with science or religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us.The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man's control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.
Mark Lawrence
Part of the art of survival as a coward is not letting things get to the point where that cowardice is exposed.
Mark Lawrence
The way I’d put it,” said Makin, “is that Rike can’t make an omelet without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails as a necklace.
Mark Lawrence
When you've committed yourself to violence it takes an almost inhuman effort to stop short. It's one of those things that once you've started need to be finished, rather like coitus, interrupting that's a sin, even the priests say so.
Mark Lawrence
The holy stone looked for all the world like a small iron pineapple, its surface divided into squares by deep grooves, a tarnished silver-steel handle or lever held tight to the side. In ancient times the pineapple was ever the symbol of welcome, though the church used the objects in a different way. Apparently, each theological student of good family and destined for high office was given one on beginning their training and forbidden from pulling the lever on pain of excommunication. A test of obedience they called it. A test of curiosity I called it. Clearly the church wanted bishops who lacked the imagination for exploration and questioning.
Mark Lawrence
There's a problem with continually stamping down on the least sensible instincts that drive men to recklessly endanger themselves. Even the most reasonable and level-headed of us have only limited space to store such unwanted emotion. You keep putting the stuff away, shoving it to the back of your mind but like an over-full cupboard there comes a point where you try to cram one more thing into it and all of a sudden something snaps, the catch gives, the door bursts open and everything inside spills out on top of you.
Mark Lawrence
The road forgets. Make your life a journey, keep moving toward what you want, leave behind anything that's too heavy to carry.
Mark Lawrence
Give us everything we ask for and suddenly it's too much.
Mark Lawrence
After all, that’s all a man really needs: a big city full of sin and sleaze, and a chance.
Mark Lawrence
Dark times call for dark choices. Choose me.
Mark Lawrence
A book is as dangerous as any journey you might take. The person who closes the back cover may not be the same one that opened the front one. Treat them with respect.
Mark Lawrence
It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears.
Mark Lawrence
Truth is a weapon and lies are a necessary shield.
Mark Lawrence
I’m a liar and a cheat and a coward, but I will never, ever, let a friend down. Unless of course not letting them down requires honesty, fair play, or bravery.
Mark Lawrence
Every star, turning in the black depth of heaven, burns for no better reason than that humanity raised its face to look. Every great deed needs to be witnessed. Go out there and do something great.
Mark Lawrence
Sometimes I wished I could cut away old memories and let the wind take them. If a sharp knife could pare away the weakness of those days, I would slice until nothing but the hard lessons remained.
Mark Lawrence
I have been too young to know, and I have been too old to care. It’s in that oh so narrow slice between that memories are made.
Mark Lawrence
I’ve never seen a man who understands so little about women and yet is so led about by them.
Mark Lawrence
I remember the stink of corruption. It had a kind of sweetness to it, a sweetness that'd make you want to hurl.
Mark Lawrence
When a course of action is forced upon you it’s best to accept it with grace and milk it for whatever you can get, right up to the moment the first opportunity to weasel out of the deal presents itself.
Mark Lawrence
You have my advice. Carry it with you. It won't slow you down.
Mark Lawrence
I want her beyond reason. I need to own, consume, worship, devour. What I've made of her in my mind cannot live in flesh.
Mark Lawrence
Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you'll find an edge to cut you.
Mark Lawrence
It is purity of spirit that will keep corruption from the flesh
Mark Lawrence
Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.
Mark Lawrence
There are no other choices for you, Prince Jalan, and when there are no choices all men are equally brave.
Mark Lawrence
It’s often said that cowards make the best torturers. Cowards have good imaginations, imaginations that torment them with all the worst stuff of nightmare, all the horrors that could befall them. This provides an excellent arsenal when it comes to inflicting misery on others. And their final qualification is that they understand the fears of their victim better than the victim does himself.
Mark Lawrence
Sometimes our worst fears aren't realized - though in my experience it's only to make room for the fears our imagination was insufficient to house.
Mark Lawrence
We all practice self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There's not enough room in a man's head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I’m well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on.
Mark Lawrence