Joe Abercrombie Quotes - Page 2

it was like staring at a whitewashed wall, but without all the emotion

What’s the difference? Fill a hundred pits with dead Northmen, congratulations, have a parade! Kill one man in the same uniform as you? A crime. A murder. Worse than despicable. Are we not all men? All blood and bone and dreams?

Rules are for children. This is war, and in war the only crime is to lose.

Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter.

Those with the least always lose the most in war.

I'm a fucking coward."
"Maybe." Craw jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Whirrun's corpse. "There's a hero. Tell me who's better off.

So you love war. I used to think you were a decent man. But I see now I was mistaken. You're a hero.

Remember, though, that you are the king's observer, not the king's champion.

A minister stands for Father Peace, but a good one is no stranger to Mother War.

Few indeed are those who get a choice. We do as we are told. We stand or fall beside those who were born near to us, who look as we do, who speak the same words, and all the while we know as little of the reasons why as does the dust we return to.

Empathy? What’s that?” Glokta winced as he rubbed at his aching leg. “It’s a sad fact, but pain only makes you sorry for yourself.

I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.

A friendship between a man and a woman was what you called it when one had been pursuing the other for a long time and never gotten anywhere.

Some men you stick to right off. But it's those that take time to stick that stick longest.

The lowly have small ambitions, and are satisfied with small indulgences. They need not get fair treatment. They need only think that they do...

Power is a bloody mirage. The closer you seem to get the further away it is