Mark Lawrence, Prince of Fools
32 quotes
"No man should go to Valhalla with brothel rash."
"Let's go to Valhalla with the sun on our faces."
"Death was kind.” He drew a sharp breath. “But no father should have to give such a kindness to his child."
"A warrior fears the battle he missed. More than any fight he can make his own, he fears the fight that’s gone, that ended without him, that no feat of arms can change."
"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."
"Cold has its own taste. It tastes of a bitten tongue. It coils around you, a living thing, a beast that means to kill you, not with wrath, not with tooth nor claw, but with the mercy of surrender, with the kindness of letting you go gentle into the long night after such a burden of pain and misery."
"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."
"When you become a father, it changes you." Snorri spoke towards the fire’s glow. "You see the world in new ways. Those who are not changed were not properly men to begin with."
"Out here you need to live in the moments. Watch the world. You're a young man, Jal, a child who's refused to grow up. Do it now, or you'll die a young man."
"Men who’ve made choices always feel they own their destiny. Few ever think to ask who shaped and offered up those choices. Who dangles the carrot they think they’ve chosen to follow."
"I'm a good liar. A great one. And to be a great liar you have to live your lies, to believe them, to the point that when you tell them to yourself enough times, even what's right before your eyes will bend itself to the falsehood."
"Genuine surprise is a great help when faced with an unwelcome duty. Of course, when it’s the paying of debts you’re forgetting, that can lead to broken fingers. And worse. I guess it’s a form of lying— lying to oneself. And I’m very good at falsehoods. They often say the best liars half-believe their lies— which makes me the very best because if I repeat a lie often enough I can end up believing it entirely, no half measures involved!"
"To err is human, to forgive is divine... but I’m only a cardinal and cardinals are human, so rather than forgiving you I’m going to err towards beating you with this stick."
"We all practice self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There's not enough room in a man's head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I’m well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on."
"It’s often said that cowards make the best torturers. Cowards have good imaginations, imaginations that torment them with all the worst stuff of nightmare, all the horrors that could befall them. This provides an excellent arsenal when it comes to inflicting misery on others. And their final qualification is that they understand the fears of their victim better than the victim does himself."
"Sometimes our worst fears aren't realized - though in my experience it's only to make room for the fears our imagination was insufficient to house."
"There are no other choices for you, Prince Jalan, and when there are no choices all men are equally brave."
"When a course of action is forced upon you it’s best to accept it with grace and milk it for whatever you can get, right up to the moment the first opportunity to weasel out of the deal presents itself."
"I’ve never seen a man who understands so little about women and yet is so led about by them."
"I’m a liar and a cheat and a coward, but I will never, ever, let a friend down. Unless of course not letting them down requires honesty, fair play, or bravery."
"Still, perhaps that's all lives are, all the world is, a collision of vast conflagrations, each sparked from nothing."
"Never having been troubled by a conscience before, I was far from sure what to expect of one, and so when for a minute or two each day at dawn a voice began to whisper to me to be a better man, I decided the shock of recent events had finally woken mine. My conscience had a name— Baraqel. I didn’t like him much."
"Battles are all about strategy, and strategy pivots on priorities. Since my priorities were Prince Jalan, Prince Jalan, and Prince Jalan, with “looking good” a distant fourth, I took the opportunity to resume running away. I find that the main thing about success is the ability to act in the moment. A hero attacks in the moment; a good coward runs in it. The rest of the world waits for the next moment and ends up as crow food."
"Keep still and your troubles find you. I might not have known much about the unborn, but I sure as hell knew about running!"
"Part of the art of survival as a coward is not letting things get to the point where that cowardice is exposed."