Mark Lawrence (author) Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

It is purity of spirit that will keep corruption from the flesh

Mark Lawrence
There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone.

Mark Lawrence
Each day the memories weigh a little heavier. Each day they drag you down that bit further. You wind them around you, a single thread at a time, and you weave your own shroud, you build a cocoon, and in it madness grows.

Mark Lawrence
I've always felt that the placement of a man's testicles is an eloquent argument against intelligent design.

Mark Lawrence
You can only win the game when you understand that it is a game. Let a man play chess, and tell him that every pawn is his friend. Let him think both bishops holy. Let him remember happy days in the shadows of his castles. Let him love his queen. Watch him lose them all.

Mark Lawrence
I like mountains, always have done. Big obstinate bits of rock sticking up where they're not wanted and getting in folk's way. Great. Climbing them is a different matter altogether though. I hate that.

Mark Lawrence
A strange thing — nails will hold a building together, but there's nothing better for taking a man apart.

Mark Lawrence
And when pain bites, men bargain. Boys too. We twist and turn, we plead and beg, we offer our tormentors what he wants so that the hurting will stop. And when there is no torturer to placate, no hooded man with hot irons and tongs, just a burn you can't escape, we bargain with God, or ourselves, depending on the size of our egos.

Mark Lawrence
Some pain you can distance yourself from, but a headache sits right where you live.

Mark Lawrence
A fool may scrawl on a slate and if no one has the wit to wipe it clean for a thousand years, the scrawl becomes the wisdom of ages.

Mark Lawrence
I'll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It's the silence that scares me. It's the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment.

Mark Lawrence
For the longest time I studied revenge to the exclusion of all else. I built my first torture chamber in the dark vaults of imagination. Lying on bloody sheets in the Healing Hall I discovered doors within my mind that I'd not found before, doors that even a child of nine knows should not be opened. Doors that never close again. I threw them wide.

Mark Lawrence
I wanted to go home and if Hell rose up to stop me, it would make me desire it more.

Mark Lawrence
I maintain a balanced view of the world, but that balance is always in my favour.

Mark Lawrence
If the sins of the flesh ever got old I didn't ever want enough years on me to know it.

Mark Lawrence
Every man has his thorns, not of him, but in him, deep as bones.

Mark Lawrence
Something in me had got broken, but not so broken I didn't remember what it was.

Mark Lawrence
Lundist held that a man who can observe is a man apart. Such a man can see opportunities where others see only the obstacles

Mark Lawrence
There's a road to hell that is paved with good intentions but it's a long route. The quicker path is paved with the kind of ignorance that clever men who just don't want to know are best at.

Mark Lawrence
In the end it seems we're just toys, easy to break and hard to mend

Mark Lawrence
I think maybe we die every day. Maybe we're born new each dawn, a little changed, a little further on our own road. When enough days stand between you and the person you were, you're strangers. Maybe that's what growing up is. Maybe I have grown up.

Mark Lawrence
It's an irony of our times that men seeking peace must make war.

Mark Lawrence
You soon learn there's no elegance or dignity in death if you spend time in the castle kitchens. You learn how ugly it is, and how good it tastes.

Mark Lawrence
I may be running out of options, but running out isn't an option.

Mark Lawrence
We die a little every day and by degrees we're reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.

Mark Lawrence
It was a defeat, resorting to crude threats in a game of subtlety, but sometimes one must sacrifice a battle to win the war.

Mark Lawrence
You got responsibilities when you're a leader. You got a responsibility not to kill too many of your men. Or who're you going to lead?

Mark Lawrence
There's something brittle in me that will break before it bends.

Mark Lawrence
Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you. Makes you predictable, makes you weak.

Mark Lawrence
Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.

Mark Lawrence