651 Quotes by Joe Abercrombie

Modesty’s for folk with nothing to boast of.

You treat folk the way you’d want to be treated, and you can’t go far wrong. That’s what my father told me. Forgot that advice, for a long time, and I done things I can never make up for. Still, it doesn’t hurt to try. My experience? You get what you give, in the end.

Enemies are like furniture, aren’t they? Better chosen for oneself than inherited.

I would be the last to disagree, but you fail to see that you are worse. No man capable of greater evil than the one who thinks himself in the right. No purpose more evil than the higher purpose. I freely admit I am a villain. That’s why you hired me. But I am no hypocrite.

Strange, to lock men up for thieving when the whole army lived on robbery. To dangle men for murder when they were all at the business of killing. What makes a crime in a time when men take what they please from who they please?

You’re a fine one to talk, Skinny Rikke. Every pinch o’ meat fell off you when you went to see the witch. You’re like a head stuck on a spear these days, but without the flies. Most o’ the flies, at least.” And she burst out laughing.

Could he truly pretend that he wanted to be her friend? A friendship between a man and a woman was what you called it when one had been pursuing the other for a long time, and had never got anywhere.

The most civilized place in the world,” murmured Father Yarvi. “Though that mostly means folk prefer to stab each other in the back than in the front.

The sad truth is that pretty people can slide through all kinds of scrapes that’d end very badly for the ugly.