Quotes by Mark Lawrence

Running aint no bad thing. Leastways if you run in the right direction.

We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off.

Lucifer spoke thus. Pride took him from heaven, though he sat at Gods right hand. Her voice grew faint, the hint of a whisper. In the end pride is the only evil, the root of all sins.Pride is all I have.

No man should go to Valhalla with brothel rash.

Death was kind.” He drew a sharp breath. “But no father should have to give such a kindness to his child.

Lets go to Valhalla with the sun on our faces.

Ive never had much use for religion, except when it comes to swearing or begging for mercy.

People always want to know things . . . until they hear them, and then its too late. Knowledge is a rug of a certain size, and the world is larger. Its not what remains uncovered at the edges that should worry you, rather what is swept beneath.

When they killed him, Mother wouldnt hold her peace, so they slit her throat. I was stupid then, being only nine, and I fought to save them both. But the thorns held me tight. Ive learned to appreciate thorns since. The thorns taught me the game. They let me understand what all those grim and serious men whove fought the Hundred War have yet to learn. You can only win the game when you understand that it IS a game. Let a man play chess, and tell him that every pawn is his friend. Let him think both bishops holy. Let him remember happy days in the shadows of his castles. Let him love his queen. Watch him loose them all.

Tell me, tutor, I said. Is revenge a science, or an art?

I’ll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment.

Cowards make the best torturers. Cowards understand fear and they can use it.

Some men are too dull to feel what might happen. Others torture themselves with maybes and populate their dreams with horrors more terrible than their worst enemy could inflict upon them.

We can’t be trapped by fear. Lives lived within such walls are just slower deaths.

A warrior fears the battle he missed. More than any fight he can make his own, he fears the fight that’s gone, that ended without him, that no feat of arms can change.

There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the [the enemy] had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it.

Its an irony of our times that men seeking peace must make war.

War, my friends, is a thing of beauty.

Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.

Cold has its own taste. It tastes of a bitten tongue. It coils around you, a living thing, a beast that means to kill you, not with wrath, not with tooth nor claw, but with the mercy of surrender, with the kindness of letting you go gentle into the long night after such a burden of pain and misery.