A book is as dangerous as any journey you might take. The person who closes the back cover may not be the same one that opened the front one. Treat them with respect.

— Mark Lawrence

After all, that’s all a man really needs: a big city full of sin and sleaze, and a chance.

— Mark Lawrence

All the best secrets are told at night.

— Mark Lawrence

...and an edge that could cut a truth from a lie.

— Mark Lawrence

And that’s how it is in this world, boy. Start a tale, just a little tale that should fade and die—take your eye off it for just a moment and when you turn back it’s grown big enough to grab you up in its teeth and shake you. That’s how it is. All our lives are tales. Some spread and grow in the telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce.

— Mark Lawrence

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

— Mark Lawrence

As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.

— Mark Lawrence

A sensible man may fear certain possibilities, but don’t let fear turn possibility into certainty.

— Mark Lawrence

Assassination is murder with a touch more precision. Brother Sim is precise.

— Mark Lawrence

At the dockside I was pleasantly surprised to find the North wasn't all hairy men in animal skins. There was also hairy women in animal skins.

— Mark Lawrence