Joe Abercrombie Quotes

“The Inquisitor waited for silence. "Do you believe in anything?""Not if I can help it. Belief alone is nothing to be proud of, Inquisitor. Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.”

“Men are brittle, I reckon. They don't bend into new shapes. They get broken into them. Crushed into them.”

“The memories of our glories fade, and rot away into half-arsed anecdotes, thin and unconvincing as some other bastard's lies. The failures, the disappointments, the regrets, they stay raw as the moments they happened.”

“That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.”

“But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.”

“There is only one thing which can master the perplexed stuff of epic material into unity; and that is, an ability to see in particular human experience some significant symbolism of man's general destiny.”

“Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.”

“On the battlefield there are no rules.”

“Some men you stick to right off. But it's those that take time to stick that stick longest.”

“I want a chance to do it all again. To do it… right.”