Quotes from The Blade Itself

“Once you've got a task to do, it's better to do it than live with the fear of it.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“Has it ever occured to you, Master Ninefingers, that a sword is different from other weapons? Axes and maces and so forth are lethal enough, but they hang on the belt like dumb brutes. But a sword...a sword has a voice.
Sheathed it has little to say, to be sure, but you need only put your hand on the hilt and it begins to whisper in your enemy's ear. A gentle word. A word of caution. Do you hear it?
Now, compare it to the sword half drawn. It speaks louder, does it not? It hisses a dire threat. It makes a deadly promise. Do you hear it?
Now compare it to the sword full drawn. It shouts now, does it not? It screams defiance! It bellows a challenge! Do you hear it?”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“Every man has his excuses, and the more vile the man becomes, the more touching the story has to be. What is my story now, I wonder?”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“I’ve fought in three campaigns,” he began. “In seven pitched battles. In countless raids and skirmishes and desperate defences, and bloody actions of every kind. I’ve fought in the driving snow, the blasting wind, the middle of the night. I’ve been fighting all my life, one enemy or another, one friend or another. I’ve known little else. I’ve seen men killed for a word, for a look, for nothing at all. A woman tried to stab me once for killing her husband, and I threw her down a well. And that’s far from the worst of it. Life used to be cheap as dirt to me. Cheaper.

“I’ve fought ten single combats and I won them all, but I fought on the wrong side and for all the wrong reasons. I’ve been ruthless, and brutal, and a coward. I’ve stabbed men in the back, burned them, drowned them, crushed them with rocks, killed them asleep, unarmed, or running away. I’ve run away myself more than once. I’ve pissed myself with fear. I’ve begged for my life. I’ve been wounded, often, and badly, and screamed and cried like a baby whose mother took her tit away. I’ve no doubt the world would be a better place if I’d been killed years ago, but I haven’t been, and I don’t know why.”

He looked down at his hands, pink and clean on the stone. “There are few men with more blood on their hands than me. None, that I know of. The Bloody-Nine they call me, my enemies, and there’s a lot of ’em. Always more enemies, and fewer friends. Blood gets you nothing but more blood. It follows me now, always, like my shadow, and like my shadow I can never be free of it. I should never be free of it. I’ve earned it. I’ve deserved it. I’ve sought it out. Such is my punishment.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“Well. What can we do, except try to do better?”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“But that was civilisation, so far as Logen could tell. People with nothing better to do, dreaming up ways to make easy things difficult.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. Still, the struggle itself is worthwhile. Knowledge is the root of power, after all.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“You have to learn to love the small things in life, like a hot bath. You have to love the small things, when you have nothing else.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“Hard words are for fools and cowards.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“History is littered with dead good men.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“There was nothing to be gained by losing his temper. There was never anything to be gained by that.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“It's hard to stay calm when you're terrified, helpless, alone, at the mercy of men with no mercy at all.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“Hurray', shouted Glokta. 'Porridge again!'He looked over at the motionless Practical. 'Porridge and honey, better than money, everything's funny, with porridge and honey!”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“Something dug into the Bloody-Nine's back, but there was no pain. It was a sign. A message in a secret tongue, that only he could understand. It told him where the next dead man was standing.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“Some things have to be done. It's better to do them, than to live with the fear of them.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“Kill me?' The Bloody-Nine laughed louder than ever. 'I do the killing, fool!”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“There are few men with more blood on their hands than me. None, that I know of.
The Bloody-Nine they call me, my enemies, and there’s a lot of ’em. Always more enemies, and fewer friends.
Blood gets you nothing but more blood.
It follows me now, always, like my shadow, and like my shadow I can never be free of it.
I should never be free of it.
I’ve earned it.
I’ve deserved it.
I’ve sought it out.

Such is my punishment.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“I’m trying to put things in the best light, but a turd’s a turd, whatever light it’s in!”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“I will confess!" shrieked Teufel, "I will confess!"
"Excellent," said Glokta brightly.
"Excellent," said Severard.
"Etherer," said Practical Frost.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“Straining and straining, getting nowhere, but unable to stop pushing in case the rock should fall and crush him. Meanwhile, arrogant bastards who were in just the same danger lazed on the slopes beside him saying, ‘Well, it’s not my rock.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“The seeds of the past bear fruit in the present.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“Different men have different ways, Logen had told him once, and you have to have fear to have courage.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“Everything frightens me, and it's well that it does. Fear is a good friend to the hunted, it's kept me alive this long. The dead are fearless, and I don't care to join them.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“Body found floating by the docks...”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“Why do big men tend to have such little brains? Perhaps they get by on brawn too often, and their minds dry up like plums in the sun.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“Then, once he had eaten, he would ask the spirits for guidance. Their guidance was pretty useless, but the company would be welcome.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“Life – the way it really is – is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse’ Joseph Brodsky”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“What a place. Glokta stifled a smile. It reminds me of myself, in a way. We both were magnificent once, and we both have our best days far behind us.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“The lowly squabble over trifles. The great wage secret wars for power and wealth, and they call it government. Wars of words, and tricks, and guile, but no less bloody for that.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

“Broken hearts heal with time, but broken teeth never do.”
― Joe Abercrombie, quote from The Blade Itself

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Popular quotes

“Why do I think these particular books have been popular? Two reasons. First, I think it is because they involve no harsh, garish violence at all. They involve game playing, really. No one is burned or cut or hurt. Certainly no one is killed. Indeed the whole sadomasochistic predicament is presented as a glorified game played out in luxurious rooms and with very attractive people, and involving very attractive slaves. There are endless motifs offered for dominance and submission, for surrender and love. It’s like a theme park of dominance and submission, a place to go to enjoy the fantasy of being overpowered by a beautiful man or woman and delightfully compelled to surrender and feel keening pleasure, without the slightest serious harm. I think it’s authentic to the way many who share this kind of fantasy really feel. I think what makes it work for people is the combination of the very graphic and unsparing sexual details mixed with the elegant fairy-tale world. Unfortunately a lot of hackwork pornography is written by those who don’t share the fantasy, and they slip into hideous violence and ugliness, thinking the market wants all that, when the market never really did. Second, this is shamelessly erotic. It pulls no punches at being what it is. It’s excessive and it is erotica. Before these books, a lot of women read what were called “women’s romances” where they had to mark the few “hot pages” in the book. I said, well, look, try this. Maybe this is what you really want, and you don’t have to mark the hot pages because every page is hot. Every page is about sexual fulfillment. Every page is meant to give you pleasure. There are no boring parts. Yet it’s very “romantic.” And well, I think this worked.”
― quote from The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

“Do you remember, Meir, that epigram quoted in the name of Rabbi Johanan ben Zaccai: 'There is no truth unless there be a faith on which it may rest'? Ironically enough the only sure principle I have achieved is this which I have known almost all my life. And it is so. For all truths rest ultimately on some act of faith, geometry on axioms, the sciences on the assumptions of the objective existence and orderliness of the world of nature. In every realm one must lay down postulates or he shall have nothing at all. So with morality and religion. Faith and reason are not antagonists. On the contrary, salvation is through the commingling of the two, the former to establish first premises, the latter to purify them of confusion and to draw the fullness of their implications. It is not certainty which one acquires so, only plausibility, but that is the best we can hope for.”
― quote from As a Driven Leaf

“Kepler's laws, although not rigidly true, are sufficiently near to the truth to have led to the discovery of the law of attraction of the bodies of the solar system. The deviation from complete accuracy is due to the facts, that the planets are not of inappreciable mass, that, in consequence, they disturb each other's orbits about the Sun, and, by their action on the Sun itself, cause the periodic time of each to be shorter than if the Sun were a fixed body, in the subduplicate ratio of the mass of the Sun to the sum of the masses of the Sun and Planet; these errors are appreciable although very small, since the mass of the largest of the planets, Jupiter, is less than 1/1000th of the Sun's mass.”
― Isaac Newton, quote from The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy

“The lack of effective and charismatic leaders always forced the Muslim youth to choose the wrong role models.”
― S. Hussain Zaidi, quote from Dongri To Dubai : Six Decades of The Mumbai Mafia

“Be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else--that's how you'll get ahead.”
― Austin Kleon, quote from Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

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About BookQuoters

BookQuoters 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.