Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes
10 quotes
"Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit."
"Names turned over by time, like the plough turning the soil. Bringing up the new while the old were buried in the mud."
"Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter."
"I'm a fucking coward.""Maybe." Craw jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Whirrun's corpse. "There's a hero. Tell me who's better off."
"So you love war. I used to think you were a decent man. But I see now I was mistaken. You're a hero."
"Remember, though, that you are the king's observer, not the king's champion."
"...Chief without soldiers is just a very lonely man in a big bloody field"
"Armour... is part of a state of mind... in which you admit the possibility... of being hit."
"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."
"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?"