Joe Abercrombie
Truly, life is the misery we endure between disappointments.Collection: Disappointment
Once you've got a task to do, it's better to do it than live with the fear of it.Collection: Tasks
That's what courage is. Taking your disappointments and your failures, your guilt and your shame, all the wounds received and inflicted, and sinking them in the past. Starting again. Damning yesterday and facing tomorrow with your head held high. Times change. It's those that see it coming, and plan for it, and change themselves to suit, that prosper.Collection: Courage
You should laugh every moment you live, for you'll find it decidedly difficult afterwards.Collection: Laughing
I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn to stop making them.Collection: Mistake
Have a smile for breakfast, you'll be shitting joy by lunch.Collection: Lunch
Strange, how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back.Collection: Strange
What’s the difference? Fill a hundred pits with dead Northmen, congratulations, have a parade! Kill one man in the same uniform as you? A crime. A murder. Worse than despicable. Are we not all men? All blood and bone and dreams?Collection: Dream
Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.Collection: Lying
Things aren't what they used to be' is the rallying cry of small minds. When men say things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them, because they were young, and had all their hopes intact. The world is bound to look a darker place as you slide into the grave.Collection: Mean
The fool strikes. The wise man smiles, and watches, and learns. Then strikes.Collection: Wise
Rules are for children. This is war, and in war the only crime is to lose.Collection: Children
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 elseCollection: Things In Life
It is easy to forget how much you have, when your eyes are always fixed on what you have not.Collection: Eye
Luck is a woman. She's drawn to those that least deserve her.Collection: Luck
Fearlessness is a fool's boast, to my mind. The only men with no fear in them are dead, or the soon to be dead, maybe. Fear teaches you caution, and respect for your enemy, and to avoid sharp edges used in anger. All good things in their place, believe me. Fear can bring you out alive, and that's the very best anyone can hope for from any fight. Every man who's worth a damn feels fear. It's the use you make of it that counts.Collection: Believe
Armour... is part of a state of mind... in which you admit the possibility... of being hit.Collection: Mind
If life has taught me one thing, it's that there are no villains. Only people, doing their best.Collection: People
If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person?Collection: Men
Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.Collection: Life
Good steel bends, but never breaks. Good steel stays always sharp and ready. Good steel feels no pain, no pity, and above all, no remorseCollection: Pain
Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.Collection: Savages
Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter.Collection: Men
Love is a fine cushion to rest upon, but only hate can make you a better person.Collection: Hate
Sometimes men change for the better. Sometimes men change for the worse. And often, very often, given time and opportunity . . .’ He waved his flask around for a moment, then shrugged. ‘They change back.Collection: Opportunity
Sometimes it doesn't matter too much what choice you make, as long as you make it quick and stick to it.Collection: Long
It's hard to be done a favor by a man you hate. It's hard to hate him so much afterwards. Losing an enemy can be worse than losing a friend, if you've had him for long enough.Collection: Hate
Chose? If you believe that I chose any part of the pitiful shadow of a life you see before you, you are very much mistaken. I chose glory and success. The box did not contain what was written on the lid.Collection: Believe
There was no such thing as luck. Luck was a word idiots used to explain the consequences of their own rashness, and selfishness, and stupidity. More often than not bad luck meant bad plans.Collection: Stupidity
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?Collection: Men
The wise wait for their moment, but never let it pass.Collection: Wise
The man is a monster. The worst I have ever seen, in fact, since I last looked in the mirror. The truth? I am rotting too. I am buried alive, and already rotting. If I was not such a coward I would kill myself, but I am, and so I must content myself with killing others in the hope that one day, if I can only wade deep enough in blood, I will come out clean.Collection: Military
Savor the little moments, son, that's my advice. They're what life is. All the little things that happen while you're waiting for something else.Collection: Son
More often than not bad luck meant bad plans.Collection: Luck
You don’t pick your family, you take what you’re given and you make the best of it.Collection: Given
Names turned over by time, like the plough turning the soil. Bringing up the new while the old were buried in the mud.Collection: Names
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 never gotten anywhere.Collection: Men
People love to see death. It reminds them that however mean, however low, however horrible their lives become… at least they have one.Collection: Mean
Only it’s just the same. In fact, do you know, because of all that pressure, and worry, and fear, it’s worse. There aren’t many men who think clearest when the stakes are highest. So people are even stupider in a war than the rest of the time. Thinking about how they’ll dodge the blame, or grab the glory, or save their skins, rather than about what will actually work There’s no job that forgives stupidity more than soldiering. No job that encourages it more.Collection: Jobs
One act presses upon another, on a path we have no choice but to follow, and each time there are reasons. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then we look up and find... this.Collection: Choices
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.Collection: Men
Those with the least always lose the most in war.Collection: War
All your life spent getting ready for the next thing. I climbed a lot of hills now. I crossed a lot of rivers. Crossed the sea even, left everything I knew and came to Styria. But there I was, waiting for me at the docks when I got off the boat, same man, same life. Next valley ain't no different from this one. No better anyway. Reckon I've learned ... just to stick in the place I'm at. Just to be the man I am.Collection: Men
I think the further away you get from completing a book, the more responses you see to it from readers, the more your own tastes and opinions shift and the more you start to see things you could have written differently in the detail, or done differently on the broader scale of plot and character.Collection: Book
History is littered with dead good menCollection: Men
Fear has made them sloppy. The world teeters at a precipe. All scared to take a step in case they put a foot into empty air. The instinct of self-preservation. It can destroy a man's efficiency.Collection: Fear
Fools boast of what they will do. Heroes do it.Collection: Hero
But you can't truly hate a man without loving him first, and there's always a trace of that love left over.Collection: Hate