"To have a good enemy, choose a friend: he knows where to strike."

"The truth is like salt. Men want to taste a little, but too much makes everyone sick."

"Life's a queue of small irritations with the Last Door at the end."

"Trust is like glass. Lovely, but only a fool rests lots of weight on it."

"Are you entirely sure of that knot?' asked Morveer. 'There is no place in the plan for a lengthy drop'.'Twenty-eight strides', said Friendly.'What?'The drop'.A brief pause, 'That is not helpful'."

"The sunrise was the colour of bad blood. It leaked out of the east and stained the dark sky red, marked the scraps of the cloud with stolen gold. Underneath it the road twisted up the mountainside towards the fortress of Fontezarmo - a cluster of sharp towers, ash-black again the wounded heavens. The sunrise was red, black and gold.The colours of their profession."

"The best steel doesn't always shine the brightest."

"The Bloody-Nine opened his mouth, and shrieked out all of his bottomless love and his endless hate in one long wail."

"I apologise, your Highness. Murder can be a painful business."

"You have to be grateful for the small things, when any minute might be your last."

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

"Give Bethod a kick from me, once you have him under your boot.'That I will, unless he gets me under his.'Never easy, kicking upwards."

"Inquisitor Lorsen's thin lip curled. 'There is truly nothing in you of what separates man from animal, is there? You are bereft of conscience. An utter absence of morality. You have no principle beyond the selfish.'Cosca's face hardened as he leaned forwards. 'Perhaps when you have faced as many disappointments and suffered as many betrayals as I, you will see it - there is no principle beyond the selfish, Inquisitor, and men are animals. Conscience is a burden we choose to bear. Morality is the lie we tell ourselves to make its bearing easier. There have been many times in my life when I have wished it was not so. But it is so."

"Things aren't what they used to be' is the rallying cry of small minds. When men say things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them, because they were young, and had all their hopes intact. The world is bound to look a darker place as you slide into the grave."

"The man is a monster. The worst I have ever seen, in fact, since I last looked in the mirror. The truth? I am rotting too. I am buried alive, and already rotting. If I was not such a coward I would kill myself, but I am, and so I must content myself with killing others in the hope that one day, if I can only wade deep enough in blood, I will come out clean."

"The gods hate those who plan badly, and help those with good friends, good swords, and good sense."

"Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter."

"Strange, how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back."

"I'm a fucking coward.'Maybe.' Craw jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Whirrun's corpse. 'There's a hero. Tell me who's better off."

"Enough pain makes a coward of anyone."

"A friendship between a man and a woman was what you called it when one had been pursuing the other for a long time and never gotten anywhere."

"So you love war. I used to think you were a decent man. But I see now I was mistaken. You're a hero."

"And Yarvi realized that Death does not bow to each person who passes her, does not sweep out her arm respectfully to show the way, speaks no profound words, unlocks no bolts. The key upon her chest is never needed, for the Last Door stands always open. She herds the dead through impatiently, needles of rank or fame or quality. She has an ever-lengthening queue to get through. A blind procession, inexhaustible."

"Empathy? What's that? Glokta winced as he rubbed at his aching leg. 'It's a sad fact, but pain only makes you sorry for yourself."

"I want a chance to do it all again. To do it right."

"It was what you gave out that made a man, not what you got back."

"You want to be merciful. To stand in the light. I understand it. I admire it. But, my queen...Only the victors can be merciful."

"Sometimes, when someone lives in danger for too long, the only time they feel alive is when death's breathing on their shoulder."

"Have a smile for breakfast, you'll be shitting joy by lunch."

"One act presses upon another, on a path we have no choice but to follow, and each time there are reasons. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then we look up and find... this."

"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."

"Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with their world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and their small reasons. It was selfishness and carelessness and waste. It was bad luck, incompetence, and stupidity. It was violence divorced from conscience or consequence. It was high ideals, even, and low methods."

"Memories sharp enough to cut himself on - the smells, the sounds, the feel of the air on his skin, the desperate hope and mad anger."

"A man can forgive all manner of faults in beautiful women that in ugly men he find entirely beyond sufferance."

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

"By swap news do you mean drink?' 'I do, and that excessively."

"Armour... is part of a state of mind... in which you admit the possibility... of being hit."

"Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage."

"Luck is a woman. She's drawn to those that least deserve her."

"They appear somewhat unreliable,' he murmured.'Unreliable? Nonsense, Superior! Out of luck is all, and we both know how that goes, no? Why, there's not a man of them I wouldn't trust my mother to.'Are you sure?'She's been dead these twenty years. What harm could they do her now?"

"It's hard to be done a favor by a man you hate. It's hard to hate him so much afterwards. Losing an enemy can be worse than losing a friend, if you've had him for long enough."

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

"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?"

"When was it exactly that I became... this? By small degrees, I suppose. One act presses hard upon another, on a path we have no choice but to follow, and each time there are reasons. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then one day we look up and fine we are... this."

"It was a look that gave her a tingle, all right, but not in a good way. In that look she saw her silly bloody hopes as twisted and broken as she'd left that Lowlander's arm, and it was no one's fault but her own. She shouldn't have let herself hope, but hopes are like weeds: however often you root them out they keep on springing up."

"Fear has made them sloppy. The world teeters at a precipe. All scared to take a step in case they put a foot into empty air. The instinct of self-preservation. It can destroy a man's efficiency."

"Bravery is the dead man's virtue."

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

"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."

"Vengeance is a way of clinging to what we have lost. A wedge in the Last Door, and through the crack we can still glimpse the faces of the dead. We strain towards it with all our being, break every rule to have it, but when we clutch it, there is nothing there. Only grief."