1
We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off.Mark Lawrence
2
There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the [the enemy] had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it.Mark Lawrence
3
There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone.Mark Lawrence
4
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.Mark Lawrence
5
I want her beyond reason. I need to own, consume, worship, devour. What I've made of her in my mind cannot live in flesh.Mark Lawrence
6
Sometimes I wished I could cut away old memories and let the wind take them. If a sharp knife could pare away the weakness of those days, I would slice until nothing but the hard lessons remained.Mark Lawrence
7
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.Mark Lawrence
8
The way I’d put it, ” said Makin, “is that Rike can’t make an omelet without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails as a necklace.Mark Lawrence
9
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.Mark Lawrence
10
Perhaps I just wanted to know what it was that I wanted. Maybe that is all that growing up means.Mark Lawrence
11
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.Mark Lawrence