“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
Mark Lawrence
Born place: in The United States
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“One conceivable way to discriminate between a scientific intellectual and a literary intellectual is by considering that a scientific intellectual can usually recognize the writing of another but that the literary intellectual would not be able to tell the difference between lines jotted down by a scientist and those by a glib nonscientist. This is even more apparent when the literary intellectual starts using scientific buzzwords, like “uncertainty principle,” “Godel’s theorem,” “parallel universe,” or “relativity,” either out of context or, as often, in exact opposition to the scientific meaning. I suggest reading the hilarious Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal for an illustration of such practice (I was laughing so loudly and so frequently while reading it on a plane that other passengers kept whispering things about me).”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, quote from Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
“I love you. I know the real you too. You think I don't but how easily you forget I was the one who bailed you out of trouble over and over again as kids. I didn't ask the perfect Ashton to be my girlfriend when I was fourteen years old. I asked the only Ash I'd ever known. You changed all on your own. I'm not going to lie. I was proud of the girl you had become. My world was complete. I had the perfect family, perfect girl, perfect future. I let myself forget the other girl you once were.”
― Abbi Glines, quote from The Vincent Boys
“The depression belongs to all of us. I think of the family down the road whose mother was having a baby and they went around the neighborhood saying, "We're pregnant." I want to go around the neighborhood saying, "We're depressed." If my mum can't get out of bed in the morning, all of us feel the same. Her silence has become ours, and it's eating us alive.”
― Melina Marchetta, quote from Saving Francesca
“Discipline is the greatest weapon against the self-righteous. We must measure the virtue of our own controlled response when answering the atrocities of fanatics. And yet, let it not be claimed, in our own oratory of piety, that we are without our own fanatics; for the self-righteous breed wherever tradition holds, and most often when there exists the perception that tradition is under assault. Fanatics can be created as easily in an environment of moral decay (whether real or imagined) as in an environment of legitimate inequity or under the banner of a common cause.
Discipline is as much facing the enemy within as the enemy before you; for without critical judgment, the weapon you wield delivers- and let us not be coy here- naught but murder.
And its first victim is the moral probity of your cause.”
― Steven Erikson, quote from The Bonehunters
“If by now you're a little confused, don't be too hard on yourself. Life is confusing, and anyone who claims that she has all the answers has probably uncovered the wrong ones.”
― Kirsten Miller, quote from Inside the Shadow City
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