Joe Abercrombie

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

“Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.”

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

“Shivers heaved out a sigh. “Just trying to make tomorrow that bit better than today is all. I’m one of those … you’ve got a word for it, don’t you?”“Idiots?”He looked sideways at her. “It was a different one I had in mind.”“Optimists.”“That’s the one. I’m an optimist.”“How’s it working out for you?”“Not great, but I keep hoping.”“That’s optimists. You bastards never learn.”

“One act presses upon another, on a path we have no choice but to follow, and each time there are reasons. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then we look up and find... this.”

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

“Bravery is the dead man’s virtue.”

“The Inquisitor waited for silence. "Do you believe in anything?""Not if I can help it. Belief alone is nothing to be proud of, Inquisitor. Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.”

“They appear somewhat unreliable," he murmured."Unreliable? Nonsense, Superior! Out of luck is all, and we both know how that goes, no? Why, there's not a man of them I wouldn't trust my mother to.""Are you sure?""She's been dead these twenty years. What harm could they do her now?”

“Lorsen shook his head in amazement. 'You truly are disgusting.''I would be the last to disagree, but you fail to see that you are worse. No man capable of greater evil than the one who thinks himself in the right. No purpose more evil than the higher purpose. I freely admit I am a villain. That's why you hired me. But I am no hypocrite.”

“The memories of our glories fade, and rot away into half-arsed anecdotes, thin and unconvincing as some other bastard's lies. The failures, the disappointments, the regrets, they stay raw as the moments they happened.”

“Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.”

“Trust is like glass. Lovely, but only a fool rests lots of weight on it.”

“Names turned over by time, like the plough turning the soil. Bringing up the new while the old were buried in the mud.”

“Strange, isn't it,' mused Glokta as he watched him struggle for air. 'Big men, small men, thin men, fat men, clever men, stupid men, they all respond the same to a fist in the guts. One minute you think you're the most powerful man in the world. The next you can't even breathe by yourself.”

“A man can forgive all manner of faults in beautiful women that in ugly men he find entirely beyond sufferance”

“Armour... is part of a state of mind... in which you admit the possibility... of being hit.”

“It was what you gave out that made a man, not what you got back.”

“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.”

“You have to be grateful for the small things, when any minute might be your last.”