Quotes from Best Served Cold

“You were a hero round these parts. That's what they call you when you kill so many people the word murderer falls short.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“You should laugh every moment you live, for you'll find it decidedly difficult afterwards.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“I've made peace with myself.
Good for you. That's the hardest war of all to win.
Didn't say I won. Just stopped fighting.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“That was the difference between a hero and a villain, a soldier and a murderer, a victory and a crime. Which side of a river you called home.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“My name is Nicomo Cosca, famed solider of fortune, and I am here for dinner.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“Have a smile for breakfast, you'll be shitting joy by lunch.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“Sometimes men change for the better. Sometimes men change for the worse. And often, very often, given time and opportunity . . .’ He waved his flask around for a moment, then shrugged. ‘They change back.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“Things aren't what they used to be' is the rallying cry of small minds. When men say things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them, because they were young, and had all their hopes intact. The world is bound to look a darker place as you slide into the grave.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“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.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“What do the dice say?"
Dice say nothing. They are dice."
Why roll'em, then?"
They are dice. What else would I do with them?”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“Love is a fine cushion to rest upon, but only hate can make you a better person.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“One cannot grow without pain. One cannot improve without it. Suffering drives us to achieve great things.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“Good steel bends, but never breaks. Good steel stays always sharp and ready. Good steel feels no pain, no pity, and above all, no remorse”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“You ever have the feeling you were in the wrong place? That if you could just get over the next hill, cross the next river, look down into the next valley, it'd all...fit. Be right."

"All my life, more of less"

“All your life spent getting ready for the next thing. I climbed a lot of hills now. I crossed a lot of rivers. Crossed the sea even, left everything I knew and came to Styria. But there I was, waiting for me at the docks when I got off the boat, same man, same life. Next valley ain’t no different from this one. No better anyway. Reckon I’ve learned … just to stick in the place I’m at. Just to be the man I am.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“They've strengthened the walls since last year. I wouldn't fancy trying to storm the place."
"Don't pretend you'd have the guts to storm the place"
"I wouldn't fancy telling someone else to storm the place"
"Don't pretend you'd have the guts to give the orders"
"I wouldn't fancy watching you tell someone else to storm the place."
"No.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“The dead can forgive. The dead can be forgiven. The rest of us have better things to do. (Monza Murcatto)”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“The sunrise was the colour of bad blood. It leaked out of the east and stained the dark sky red, marked the scraps of the cloud with stolen gold. Underneath it the road twisted up the mountainside towards the fortress of Fontezarmo - a cluster of sharp towers, ash-black again the wounded heavens. The sunrise was red, black and gold.
The colours of their profession.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“A man can forgive all manner of faults in beautiful women that in ugly men he find entirely beyond sufferance”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“You are Shenkt? I expected more.”
“Pray to whatever god you believe in that you never see more.”
“I do not pray.”
Shenkt leaned close, and whispered in his ear. “I advise you to start.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“Still, it was better to swear an oath and never follow through than not even to bother with the oath. Wasn't it?”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“One last chance. That’s all I’m asking.” He had lost count of the number of last chances he had wasted. “Just one more. God!” He had never believed in God for an instant. “Fates!” He had never believed in Fates either. “Anyone!” He had never believed in anything much beyond the next drink. “Just one… more… chance.”

“Alright. One more.”

Cosca blinked. “God? Is that… you?”

Someone chuckled. A woman’s voice, and a sharp, mocking, most ungodlike sort of a chuckle. “You can kneel if you like, Cosca.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“I've been on jobs like that before, everyone stuck on the money not the work, watching their backs every minute. Bad for your health and your business. We'll do this civilised, or not at all. What do you say?
"I say civilised," said Shenkt. "For pity's sake, let's kill like honest men.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“When God means to punish a man He sends him stupid friends and clever enemies.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“I have seen hell, it is a great city under siege.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“To have a good enemy, choose a friend: he knows where to strike.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“A man without discipline is no better than a dog. A soldier without discipline is no better than a corpse. Worse, in fact. A corpse is no threat to his comrades.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“Are you entirely sure of that knot?' asked Morveer. 'There is no place in the plan for a lengthy drop'.
'Twenty-eight strides', said Friendly.
'What?'
'The drop'.
A brief pause, 'That is not helpful'.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“It was what you gave out that made a man, not what you got back.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“To the starving man, bread is beautiful. To the homeless man, a roof is beautiful. To the drunkard, wine is beautiful. Only those who want for nothing else need find beauty in a lump of rock. “Stolicus”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

“You keep your guard too low, I am afraid. You are full of passion, but passion without discipline is no more than a child’s tantrum.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from Best Served Cold

About the author

Popular quotes

“Author? Author? Did you write these legs?'
'Yes."
'Well, I don't like dem. I don't like 'em at all at all. I could ha' writted better legs meself.”
― Spike Milligan, quote from Puckoon

“Everyone should have someone that cares.Someone that doesn't give up on them.Someone to always care what they're doing.Right at this moment,I make it my goal to be that someone for Park.”
― Cheryl McIntyre, quote from Before Now

“She was still obliged to leave the house every day, on her usual hunt for food; and especially on days of bad weather she had no other solution but to leave Useppe alone, his own guard, locking him in the room. It was then that Useppe learned to pass time thinking. He would press both fists to his brow and begin to think. What he thought about is not given to us to know; and probably his thoughts were imponderable futilities. But it's a fact that, while he was thinking in this way, the ordinary time of other people was reduced for him almost to zero. In Asia there exists a little creature known as the lesser panda, which looks like something between a squirrel and a teddy bear and lives on the trees in inaccessible mountain forests; and every now and then it comes down to the ground, looking for buds to eat. Of one of these panda it was told that he spent millennia thinking on his own tree, from which he climbed down to the ground every three hundred years. But in reality, the calculation of such periods was relative: in fact, while three hundred years had gone by on earth, on that panda's tree barely ten minutes had passed.”
― Elsa Morante, quote from History

“War thoughts again. I think back to the business cards from that health shop earlier on. I think about miniature wars that individuals fight all the time. They fight against cellulite, or negative emotions, or addictions, or stress. I think about how we can now hire all different sorts of mercenaries to help us fight against ourselves…Therapists, manicurists, hairdressers, personal trainers, life coaches. But what’s it all for? What do all these little wars achieve? Although it is a part of my life too, and I want to be thin and pretty and not laughed at in the street and not so stressed and mad that I start screaming on the tube, it suddenly seems a little bit ridiculous. All the time we do these things we are trying to enlist ourselves into a bigger war. We are trying to join up, constantly, with the enemy.
-
Hitler tried to impose his shiny, blonde, neat, sparkling world on us all and we resisted. So how is it that when McDonald’s and Disney and The Gap and L’Oreal and all the others try to do the same thing we all just say, ‘OK’? Hitler needed marketing, that’s all. His propaganda was, of course, brilliant for its time, everyone knows that. What a great idea, to make people feel that they belong to something, that their identity makes them special. If Hilter had bee able to enlist a twenty-first-century marketing department, would he have been able to sell Nazism to everyone? Why not? You can just see a beautiful, thin woman with her long blonde hair moving softly in the breezes, and the tagline ‘Because I’m worth it’.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from PopCo

“Achievement was worthy of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state. However great a citizen might become, however great he might wish to become, the truest greatness of all still belonged to the Roman Republic itself”
― Tom Holland, quote from Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

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