"Few indeed are those who get a choice. We do as we are told. We stand or fall beside those who were born near to us, who look as we do, who speak the same words, and all the while we know as little of the reasons why as does the dust we return to."

"One day you're something, so promising and full o' dares, so big the world's too small a place to hold you. Then, 'fore you know it, you're old, and you realise all them things you had in mind you'll never get to. All them doors you felt too big to fit through have already shut. Only one left open and it leads to nothing but nothing."

"What's the difference? Fill a hundred pits with dead Northmen, congratulations, have a parade! Kill one man in the same uniform as you? A crime. A murder. Worse than despicable. Are we not all men? All blood and bone and dreams?"

"You can always make enemies of your friends,' said Sumael. 'Making friends of your enemies is harder labor."

"A set of huge marble busts stared smugly down from on high: great merchants and financiers of Styrian history, by the look of them. Criminals made heroes by colossal success."

"One cannot grow without pain. One cannot improve without it. Suffering drives us to achieve great things."

"Those with the least always lose the most in war."

"You look especially beautiful this morning, Monza.'That brought a smile to the corner of her mouth. The corner he couldn't see. 'Well. Facts are facts."

"Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit."

"Bang! The end of his little finger, now, and three more pieces of the rest. His middle finger was down to the knuckle, almost. Severard stared, his eyes with with horror, his breath coming short, fast gasps. Shock, amazement, stunned terror. Glokta leaned down to his ear. 'I hope you weren't planning to take up the violin, Severard. You'll be lucky if you can play a fucking gong by the time we're done here."

"Names turned over by time, like the plough turning the soil. Bringing up the new while the old were buried in the mud."

"The lowly have small ambitions, and are satisfied with small indulgences. They need not get fair treatment. They need only think that they do."

"Monza never had understood why getting out a tit or two made for a better painting. But painters seemed to think it did, so tits is what you got."

"Some men laugh easily. It makes them winning dinner companions."

"Mercy and cowardice are the same,' she snapped out. 'But you want their land, not their lives, no? Dead men can't obey."

"Remember, though, that you are the king's observer, not the king's champion."

"I've made peace with myself.Good for you. That's the hardest war of all to win.Didn't say I won. Just stopped fighting."

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

"He blamed every fucker available excepting, of course, the one who was actually to blame, the one sitting in his saddle and getting colder, hungrier, and more lost with every unpleasant moment. 'Shit!' he roared at nothing."

"Chief without soldiers is just a very lonely man in a big bloody field."

"Hurray', shouted Glokta. 'Porridge again!'He looked over at the motionless Practical. 'Porridge and honey, better than money, everything's funny, with porridge and honey!"

"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."

"There was no such thing as luck. Luck was a word idiots used to explain the consequences of their own rashness, and selfishness, and stupidity. More often than not bad luck meant bad plans."

"The world is all change, my friend. We all would like to go back, but the past is done. We must look forwards. We must change ourselves, however painful it may be, or be left behind."

"It's a crime, when you think about how little time we get, that a man should ever be bored. When you are lying on your death bead, I expect you regret those weeks wasted more than your worst mistakes."

"When you're in hell, only a devil can point the way out."

"Every war carries within it the seeds of the next."

"It was like staring at a whitewashed wall, but without all the emotion."

"Strange, isn't it,' mused Glokta as he watched him struggle for air. 'Big men, small men, thin men, fat men, clever men, stupid men, they all respond the same to a fist in the guts. One minute you think you're the most powerful man in the world. The next you can't even breathe by yourself."

"But you know what they say - old milk turns sour but old scores just get sweeter."

"Lorsen shook his head in amazement. 'You truly are disgusting.'I would be the last to disagree, but you fail to see that you are worse. No man capable of greater evil than the one who thinks himself in the right. No purpose more evil than the higher purpose. I freely admit I am a villain. That's why you hired me. But I am no hypocrite."

"He is dead and I, the self serving coward that I am, still live. Life is not fair. There is no pattern. People die at random. Something everyone knows, but no one truly believes. They think that when it comes to them there will be a lesson, a meaning, a story worth telling. That death will come to them as a dread scholar, a fell knight, a terrible emperor.Death is a bored clerk, with too many orders to fill. There is no reckoning. No profound moment. It creeps up on us from behind, and snatches us away while we shit."

"You stick a bunch of drunken murderers together, ain't long before some turn to thieving, then to lying, then to bad language, and pretty soon to sobriety, raising families and making an honest living."

"The Forest that had been about her all her life, certain as a mountain, was made ashes. The high gable that had stood for two hundred years fallen in ruin. Throvenland was torn apart like smoke on the wind. Nowhere would be safe, ever again."

"On the battlefield there are no rules."

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