“Tell me, tutor,' I said. 'Is revenge a science, or an art?”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“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, quote from Prince of Thorns
“There’s something brittle in me that will break before it bends.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“Hate will keep you alive where love fails”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“The biggest lies we save for ourselves.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“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.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you. Makes you predictable, makes you weak.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“Few things worth having can be got easily.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“Cowards make the best torturers. Cowards understand fear and they can use it.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“When they killed him, Mother wouldn't 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. I've learned to appreciate thorns since. The thorns taught me the game. They let me understand what all those grim and serious men who've 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.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“I may be running out of options, but running out isn't an option.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“Lucifer spoke thus. Pride took him from heaven, though he sat at God's 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.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“Most men have at least one redeeming feature. Finding one for Brother Rike requires a stretch. Is 'big' a redeeming feature?”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“You soon learn there’s no elegance or dignity in death if you spend time in the castle kitchens. You learn how ugly it is, and how good it tastes.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“I think maybe we die every day. Maybe we're born new each dawn, a little changed, a little further on our own road. When enough days stand between you and the person you were, you're strangers. Maybe that's what growing up is. Maybe I have grown up.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“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.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“Running ain't no bad thing. Leastways if you run in the right direction.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“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 lose them all.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“You got responsibilities when you’re a leader. You got a responsibility not to kill too many of your men. Or who’re you going to lead?”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“What's it going to take for you to open that door? Gold? Blood?"
"Your name and password."
"My name is Honorous Jorg Ancrath, my password is divine right. Now open the fecking door.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“The way to break the cycle is to kill every single one of the bastards that fucked you over. Every last one of them. Kill them all. Kill their mother, kill their brothers, kill their children, kill their dog.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“This is where it starts. When they write the legend, this will be the first page. Some old monk will go blind illuminating this page, Makin. This is where it all starts." I didn't say how short the book might be though.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“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.” I looked into my own darkness. I knew what it was to be trapped, and to watch ruination. “Each day the memories weigh a little heavier. Each day they drag you down that bit further. You wind them around you, a single thread at a time, and you weave your own shroud, you build a cocoon, and in it madness grows.” The lights pulsed beneath my fingers, ebbing and flowing to the beat of my voice. “You sit here with your yesterdays queuing at your shoulder. You listen to their reproach and curse those that gave you life.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“She had the eyes of everyone who ever cared.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“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, quote from Prince of Thorns
“In the end it seems we're just toys, easy to break and hard to mend.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“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, quote from Prince of Thorns
“I like mountains, always have done. Big obstinate bits of rock sticking up where they're not wanted and getting in folk's way. Great. Climbing them is a different matter altogether though. I hate that.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“That's not a plan. That's a way to get a death so famously stupid that they'll be laughing about it in alehouses for a hundred years to come," Makin said.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from Prince of Thorns
“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, quote from Prince of Thorns
Mark Lawrence
Born place: in The United States
See more on GoodReads
“There is always, for some reason, an element of sadness mingled with my thoughts of human happiness, and, on this occasion, at the sight of a happy man I was overcome by an oppressive feeling that was close upon despair. It was particularly oppressive at night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my brother’s bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! ‘What a suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying... Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and in the streets; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one who would cry out, who would give vent to his indignation aloud. We see the people going to market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by night, talking their silly nonsense, getting married, growing old, serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes... Everything is quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition... And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It’s a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him—disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree—and all goes well.”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from Racconti
“Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems
“Neither could speak. It was the day that a silence settled on the pair of them, and they were bound close by it. Will felt, in that moment, too small to face such misery, but she knew that she would have to expand now, with a terrible rush, to fill the empty space.”
― Katherine Rundell, quote from The Girl Savage
“Generally speaking, if a guy breaks your jaw and leg and cuts off your robotic arm, you file charges and get a restraining order. The only exception is when subtle machinations are needed to save the world from a massive, catastrophic alien takeover. But in no other circumstance.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Dangerous
“I don't ask any questions. I don't say a word. There's a time to be quiet, and this is one of them because all sound is just white noise when inner thoughts are the only language one can comprehend.”
― Renee Ericson, quote from More Than Water
Noughts & Crosses
The Scorpio Races
Torn
The Last Temptation...
The Children of Húri...
The SourceBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
