651 Quotes by Joe Abercrombie

Sometimes when I’m really enjoying a book, I’ll read a sentence or paragraph and just think – how can someone’s head be wired in such a way that they’d come up with that?

Science is a system of rational thought devised to investigate the world and establish the laws by which it operates. The scientist uses those laws to achieve an effect. One which might easily appear magical in the eyes of the primitive.

Nothing like being wanted, is there? Wanted by someone you want. Always seems like magic, that something can feel so good but cost nothing.

When you tell a lie, you have to sound like you believe it. Goes double for the ones you tell yourself.

You killed him all to bits, and robbed everyone who knew him, and cut all the good he might ever do out of the world.

You can have enemies you never really meet, Logen had plenty. You can kill men you don’t know, he’d done it often. But you can’t truly hate a man without loving him first, and there’s always a trace of that love left over.

Anyway, it seems to me a man can do an awful lot of evil in no time at all. Swing of a blade is all it takes. Doing good needs time. And all manner of complicated efforts. Most men don’t have the patience for it. ‘Specially not these days.

You’d have to be a bold man to bet your life on what I’d dare. How bold are you? -Sand dan Glokta.

But then it’s difficult, isn’t it, to make a passionate argument for what you already have? So boring. Whereas the delightful alternative? A bouquet of promises! A sackful of dreams! A glorious ship of fantasies, undamaged by collision with actually getting anything done.