Grimdark books are the best! Explore the finest quotes from The First Law Trilogy
Prince of Thorns
Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you’ll find an edge to cut you. 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. You sit here with your yesterdays queuing at your shoulder. You listen to their reproach and curse those that gave you life.
There’s something brittle in me that will break before it bends.
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.
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.
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.
What’s it going to take for you to open that door? Gold? Blood? Your name and password. My name is Honorous Jorg Ancrath, my password is divine right. Now open the fecking door.
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?
She had the eyes of everyone who ever cared.
In the end, it seems we’re just toys, easy to break and hard to mend.
We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretense of understanding. We paper over the voids of our comprehension with science and religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across the surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us. The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man’s control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.
The weakest spot in a good defence is designed to fail. It falls, but in falling it summons the next defence and so on. It’s all about layers. At the end of it all you’ll find yourself facing the thing you sought to avoid all along, only now you’re weaker, and it’s forewarned.
Jesu, Rike, you been gargling rat piss again?
The perfumes of lords and ladies tickled at my nose: lavender and orange oil. On the road, shit has the decency to stink.
I think you need to have lived more to truly know a man’s heart. You need to have made more transactions in life to know the worth of the coin you spend so freely.
I held my arms wide to the rain. I could feel it beat on me. I didn’t have so many years under my belt, but even to me the rain fell like memory. It woke wild nights in me when I stood on the Keep Tower, on the edge above a high fall, near drowned in the deluge and daring the lightning to touch me.
War, my friends, is a thing of beauty. Those as says otherwise are losing.
There is no evil, Makin,” I said. “There’s the love of things, power, comfort, sex, and there’s what men are willing to do to satisfy those lusts.
And, because in some hard core of me, in some stubborn trench of selfish refusal, I could not, even at ten years of age, surrender to anything or anyone, I fought that pain. I analysed its offensive, and found its lines of attack. It festered, like the corruption in a wound turned sour, drawing strength from me. I knew enough to know the remedy. Hot iron for infection, cauterize, burn, make it pure. I cut from myself all the weakness of care. The love for my dead, I put aside, secure in a casket, an object of study, a dry exhibit, no longer bleeding, cut loose, set free. The capacity for new love, I burned out. I watered it with acid until the ground lay barren and nothing there would sprout, no flower take root.
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.
Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you. Makes you predictable, makes you weak.
The first time I heard that kind of pain, my mother’s pain, something held me back. I’ll tell you it was the hook-briar which held me fast. I’ll show you the scars. But in the night, before the dreams come, a voice whispers to me that it was fear that held me back, terror that rooted me in the briar, safe while I watched them die.
King of Thorns
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.
Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.
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.
They say that time is a great teacher but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
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.
A man is made of memories. It is all we are. Captured moments, the smell of a place, scenes played out time and again on a small stage. We are memories, strung on storylines—the tales we tell ourselves about ourselves, falling through our lives into tomorrow.
When you’ve committed yourself to violence it takes an almost inhuman effort to stop short. It’s one of those things that once you’ve started need to be finished, rather like coitus, interrupting that’s a sin, even the priests say so.
And there it is, proof if proof were needed, that though God may mould the clay and fashion some of us hale, some strong, some beautiful, inside we make ourselves, from foolish things, breakable, fragile things: the thorns, that dog, the hope that Katherine might make me better than I am. Even Rike’s blunt wants were born of losses he probably remembered only in dreams. All of us fractured, awkward collages of experience wrapped tight to present a defensible face to the world. And what makes us human is that sometimes we snap. And in that moment of release we’re closer to gods than we know.
In any case I would cut myself a path to the throne even if some bastard-born herder had fathered me on a gutter-whore—genealogy can work for me or I can cut down the family tree and make a battering ram. Either way is good.
Emperor of Thorns
This is where the wise man turns away. This is where the holy kneel and call on God. These are the last miles, my brothers. Don’t look to me to save you. Don’t think I will not spend you. Run if you have the wit. Pray if you have the soul. Stand your ground if courage is yours. But don’t follow me. Follow me, and I will break your heart.
There’s a slope down toward evil, a gentle gradient that can be ignored at each step, unfelt. It’s not until you look back, see the distant heights where you once lived, that you understand your journey.
Nature shaped the claw to trap, and the tooth to kill, but the thorn…the thorn’s only purpose is to hurt.
Take a rest and the world catches up with you. Lesson in life—keep moving.
Every man has his thorns, not of him, but in him, deep as bones. The scars of the briar mark me, a calligraphy of violence, a message of blood-writ, requiring a lifetime to translate.
People who talk about the weather would be better served by admitting they’ve nothing to say but like the sound of their own voice.
A victim who believes himself anticipated at every turn is not only crippled by uncertainty but also easier to predict.
Men are busy dying from the moment they’re born but it’s a crawl from the cradle to the grave.
Decadence begins when the budget to beautify a man’s home exceeds the coin spent to ensure its defense.
Time heals all wounds, but often it’s only by the application of the grave, and while we live some hurts live with us, burning, making us twist and turn to escape them. And as we twist, we turn into other men.