Joe Abercrombie

I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.

Once you've got a task to do, it's better to do it than live with the fear of it. 

Rules are for children. This is war, and in war the only crime is to lose.

Truly, life is the misery we endure between disappointments.

Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.

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.

We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged.

You were a hero round these parts. That's what they call you when you kill so many people the word murderer falls short

Honour, eh? What the hell is that anyway? Every man thinks it's something different. You can't drink it. You can't fuck it. The more of it you have the less good it does you, and if you've got none at all you don't miss it.

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

Sometimes it doesn't matter too much what choice you make, as long as you make it quick and stick to it.

C. S. Friedman

I sold my soul for knowledge of the future, only to have that very pact render me forever ignorant.

What is a child?" he asks her.
The diamond gaze does not flinch. "Creatures that are sold on the street by their parents, to get the coin to make more children." She paused. "Adults sell themselves.

Civilized man longs for the illusion of barbarism. Either his culture fulfills this need by adopting its outer trappings, or he will be seduced by his first contact with a culture that does.

The Tyr had tried. It had really tried. It must have gone over every element of human psychology, tried desperately to understand the nature of human aesthetic sense … and then failed, miserably, in every regard.

My identity is without root.

We share need, not-human. Yours is straightforward.” … “Mine is less so, but you will serve it. Come.

The gods, he knows now, will not help mankind. If they even exist—which he is no longer certain of—it is clear they do not care what happens. Perhaps they will even applaud when the last monuments of the Second Age of Kings crumble to dust, and the men who once worshiped them are reduced to the level of beasts. Perhaps that is what they intended all along.

All about us were people. Perhaps a hundred. Men. Experience had taught me that humans were cruelest when segregated by sex, and the cold feeling in the pit of my stomach became led. What had I let myself in for?

Susanna Kearsley

The past can teach us, nurture us, but it cannot sustain us. The essence of life is change, and we must move ever forward or the soul will wither and die.

Whatever time we have," he said, "it will be time enough.

But life, if nothing else, had taught her promises weren't always to be counted on, and what appeared at first a shining chance might end in bitter disappointment.

Men who watch, and say little, very often are much wiser than the men they serve.

Ye'll never best your fears until ye face them.

Ever try to hold a butterfly? It can't be done. You damage them," he said. 'As gentle as you try to be, you take the powder from their wings and they won't ever fly the same. It's kinder to let them go.

Knowing that the battle will not end the way he wishes does not make it any less worthwhile the fight.

Tis never the place, but the people one shares it with who are the cause of our happiest memories.

Life is always uncertain,'he said with a shrug. 'We cannot let the fear of what might happen stop us living as we choose.

Steve Berry

Study the past if you would define the future. --CONFUCIUS.

He that endureth to the end, shall be saved

Say it, do it, preach it, shout it, but never, absolutely never, believe your own bullshit.

Follow your heart. It rarely leads you astray. It's thinking that gets us into trouble.

If all my friends jumped off a bridge, I wouldn't jump with them. I'd be at the bottom, hoping to catch them.

But heroes, at times, had to be fools

The people can be forced to fear, but not to love.

It's the circumstances that create fear. How you respond is all you can control. Concentrate on that, and you'll always succeed.

If you want to live your whole life free from pain,you must either be a god or a corpse.

It's been my experience, Langford, that the past always has a way of returning. Those who don't learn, or can't remember it, are doomed to repeat it.

Colum McCann

The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.

Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place.

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.

Good days, they come around the oddest corners.

Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.

Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing its yours.

I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.

Justin Cronin

We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load

Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. Doing the unpopular thing because it's what you believe, and the heck with everybody.

What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.

So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying

It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.

Sara waited a respectful time, knowing there was nothing she could do to ease the woman's pain. Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody's business but yours

It's different being afraid when there's the hope it will amount to something.

She remembered no one at all. She remembered one day thinking: I am alone. There is no I but I. She lived in the dark. She taught herself to walk in the light, though it was not easy.

Junot Díaz

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.

The half-life of love is forever.

And that's when I know it's over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end.

And that's when I know it's over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end.

Nothing more exhilarating ... than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.

She's sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.

She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.

Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third elvish, but put two sentences in spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking over."

Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.

Paula McLain

It gave me a sharp kind of sadness to think that no matter how much I loved him and tried to put him back together again, he might stay broken forever.

Why is it every other person you meet says they're an artist? A real artist doesn't need to gas on about it, he doesn't have time. He does his work and sweats it out in silence, and no one can help him at all.

He was such an enigma, really - fierce and strong and weak and cruel. An incomparable friend and a son of a bitch. In the end, there wasn't one thing about him that was truer than the rest. It was all true.

I miss good old-fashioned honorable people just trying to make something of life. Simply, without hurting anyone else. I know that makes me a sap.

Books could be an incredible adventure. I stayed under my blanket and barely moved, and no one would have guessed how my mind raced and my heart soared with stories.

Sometimes I wish we could rub out all of our mistakes and start fresh, from the beginning,' I said. 'And sometimes I think there isn't anything to us but our mistakes.

My life was my life; I would have to stare it down, somehow, and make it work for me.

To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past, too-that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up.

Laura Hillenbrand

His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.

Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man's soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it.

A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain. Louie thought: Let go.

In 1938... the year's #1 newsmaker was not FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. Nor was it Lou Gehrig or Clark Gable. The subject of the most newspaper column inches in 1938 wasn't even a person. It was an undersized, crooked-legged racehorse named Seabiscuit.

Without dignity, identity is erased.

I am in an altogether new world now. I can think of nothing more wonderful. It is a real touch of all that heaven means.

Such beauty, he thought, was too perfect to have come about by mere chance. That day in the center of the Pacific was, to him, a gift crafted deliberately, compassionately, for him and Phil. Joyful and grateful in the midst of slow dying, the two men bathed in that day until sunset brought is, and their time in the doldrums, to an end.

Michio Kaku

Music is the voice of God traveling through ten-dimensional hyperspace.

Some people seek meaning in life through personal gain, through personal relationship, or through personal experiences. However, it seems to me that being blessed with the intellect to divine the ultimate secrets of nature gives meaning enough to life.

Physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself.

In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and the stars is the distortion of space and time.

By 2100, our destiny is to become like the gods we once worshipped and feared. But our tools will not be magic wands and potions but the science of computers, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and most of all, the quantum theory.

To understand the difficulty of predicting the next 100 years, we have to appreciate the difficulty that the people of 1900 had in predicting the world of 2000.

...the laws of physics, carefully constructed after thousands of years of experimentation, are nothing but the laws of harmony one can write down for strings and membranes. The laws of chemistry are the melodies that one can play on these strings. the universe is a symphony of strings. And the "Mind of God," which Einstein wrote eloquently about, is cosmic music resonating throughout hyperspace.