Quotes from The Liar's Key

Mark Lawrence ·  480 pages

Rating: (11.1K votes)


“Still, children hope in ways adults find hard to imagine. They carry their dreams before them, fragile, in both arms, waiting for the world to trip them.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“Every fortune-teller I ever met was a faker. First thing you should do to a soothsayer is poke them in the eye and say, ‘Didn’t see that coming, did you?”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“Sometimes my lies impressed the hell out of me.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“Throw away too much of your past and you abandon the person who walked those days. When you pare away at yourself you can reinvent, that’s true enough, but such whittling always seems to reveal a lesser man, and promises to leave you with nothing at the end.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“Sixty beats of a heart would be enough. If I could hold them. Let them know I came for them no matter what stood in my way. It would be enough. Sixty beats of a heart past that door would outweigh sixty years in this world without them.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key



“The night can last twenty hours and even when the day finally breaks it never gets above a level of cold I call “fuck that”—as in you open the door, your face freezes instantly to the point where it hurts to speak, but manfully you manage to say “fuck that,” before turning round, and going back to bed.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“I hit her. I’m not one for hitting women . . . or anyone else for that matter. In fact I’m not one for hitting anything liable to hit back, but given the choice between a hefty man and a slightly built woman I’ll punch out the woman every time.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“Fear is a valuable commodity, it’s common sense compressed into its purest form.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“A lie can run deeper than strength or wisdom.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“If there’s one thing I can’t stand about licentious behaviour, it’s when I’m not involved.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key



“A consequence of boredom is that a man is forced to look either to the future or the past, or sideways into his imagination.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“A great comfort, Tuttugu. I always like to do my drowning within sight of land.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“The breaking of day changes all things, Snorri. Nothing endures beyond the count of the sun. Pile a sufficient weight of mornings upon a thing and it will change. Even the rocks themselves will not outlast the morning.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“Give us everything we ask for and suddenly it's too much.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“I’m only a little ashamed to say I outsprinted the boy. Old habits die hard. It’s good to be faster than what’s chasing you, but really the important thing in running away is to be faster than the slowest of those being pursued. Rule number one: be ahead of the next man. Or child.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key



“There’s a simple joy in casting a rock into still waters and watching the ripples spread. It’s the thrill of destruction combined with the surety that all will be well again—everything as it was. A stone had fallen into my comfortable existence at court, so large that the waves washed me to the ends of the earth, but perhaps on my return I would find it as before, unchanged and waiting to receive me. Much of what men do in later life is just throwing stones, albeit bigger stones into different ponds.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“it’s hard to play the enigmatic prince of romance when the object of your affections gets to watch you shit into the sea twice a day.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“Anything I had to say seemed shallow beside the depth of his grief. Words are awkward tools at best, too blunt for delicate tasks.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“You look different,” Snorri said. “I think ‘even more handsome’ was the phrase you were looking for.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“Great emotion, it turns out, is a fire, and like a fire it needs fuel. Unfed it dies down to a hot and banked glow, ready to ignite again but leaving space for other matters.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key



“Thor might be god of strength and war, Odin of wisdom, but he sometimes wondered if it wasn’t Loki, the trickster god, who stood behind what unfolded. A lie can run deeper than strength or wisdom. And hadn’t the world proved to be a bitter joke?”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“These were bankers we were talking about, and I owed taxes. They’d hunt me to the ends of the earth!”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“I didn’t know what I would do except that Edris Dean would be dead at the end of it.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“The road forgets. Make your life a journey, keep moving toward what you want, leave behind anything that’s too heavy to carry. •”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“What saves us all are the deeds of fools as often as the acts of the wise.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key



“There's a problem with continually stamping down on the least sensible instincts that drive men to recklessly endanger themselves. Even the most reasonable and level-headed of us have only limited space to store such unwanted emotion. You keep putting the stuff away, shoving it to the back of your mind but like an over-full cupboard there comes a point where you try to cram one more thing into it and all of a sudden something snaps, the catch gives, the door bursts open and everything inside spills out on top of you.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“The best liars always tell the truth—they just choose which parts.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“Men are many and take strength as a challenge, difference as a crime.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


“Magic always struck me as hard and dangerous work...not that there are any words you can put before "work" that makes it sound attractive. Certainly not "dangerous" or "hard.”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from The Liar's Key


About the author

Mark Lawrence
Born place: in The United States
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“„Mně to trapné nepřišlo. Jsem rád, že nás viděl,“ řekl Erik spokojeně.
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“They had chains which they fastened about the leg of the nearest hog, and the other end of the chain they hooked into one of the rings upon the wheel. So, as the wheel turned, a hog was suddenly jerked off his feet and borne aloft. At the same instant the ear was assailed by a most terrifying shriek; the visitors started in alarm, the women turned pale and shrank back. The shriek was followed by another, louder and yet more agonizing--for once started upon that journey, the hog never came back; at the top of the wheel he was shunted off upon a trolley and went sailing down the room. And meantime another was swung up, and then another, and another, until there was a double line of them, each dangling by a foot and kicking in frenzy--and squealing. The uproar was appalling, perilous to the ear-drums; one feared there was too much sound for the room to hold--that the walls must give way or the ceiling crack. There were high squeals and low squeals, grunts, and wails of agony; there would come a momentary lull, and then a fresh outburst, louder than ever, surging up to a deafening climax. It was too much for some of the visitors--the men would look at each other, laughing nervously, and the women would stand with hands clenched, and the blood rushing to their faces, and the tears starting in their eyes. Meantime, heedless of all these things, the men upon the floor were going about their work. Neither squeals of hogs nor tears of visitors made any difference to them; one by one they hooked up the hogs, and one by one with a swift stroke they slit their throats. There was a long line of hogs, with squeals and life-blood ebbing away together; until at last each started again, and vanished with a splash into a huge vat of boiling water. It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests--and so perfectly within their rights! They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without a pretence at apology, without the homage of a tear. Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure; but this slaughtering-machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory.”
― Upton Sinclair, quote from The Jungle


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