Mark Lawrence > Quotes

“Nostalgia is the best and the worst feeling - complex - nothing has the ability to so delight and wound us simultaneously, except perhaps for love.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“It's always the books you don't have that call to you, you know that. Not the ones already on your shelf. They can wait.”
― Mark Lawrence

“Hurts don't stop, but they fade into the shadows of what they were. That's sad. That something so vital, something that bit you so deep, can be eroded by time into a story that almost seems like it happened to someone else. Any hurt. The years have taken away her meaning. It lessens us.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“Nostalgia is a drug, a knife. Against young skin it carries a dull edge, but time will teach you that nostalgia cuts - and that it's a blade we cannot keep from applying to our own flesh.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“Did you ever meet someone clever who was truly happy?”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“It’s always the books you don’t have that call to you, you know that. Not the ones already on your shelf. They can wait.”
― Mark Lawrence

“Ruli spoke with the total conviction she reserved for all guesswork.”
― Mark Lawrence

“Somehow the stories that never happened, ones that merely sprang from the dreaming of some long-dead author, were more true that the histories that might be found on the opposite shelf.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy (1) — THE BOOK THAT WOULDN’T BURN

“You can’t step into the same river twice... [Y]ou cannot read the same book twice either. You are the river.”
― Mark Lawrence

“…Relationships were as much a part of people as water was a part of blood. Without water, blood was just a red dust.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“There's nothing brave in committing to a fight - you just need to understand that there's a scarier outcome waiting for you if you don't. Hesitation's the killer. They try to train hesitation out of you, but most people have it in their bones.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy (1) — THE BOOK THAT WOULDN’T BURN

“Mythology was, he said, the product of history. Just as the trees of ancient forests fell and became buried and compacted by each subsequent generation, covered over, buried ever deeper until the crushing pressure of untold fathoms changed their structure into coal, history itself became buried by the flood of years and crystallized into myth.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy (1) — THE BOOK THAT WOULDN’T BURN

“Without guilt we would all be monsters. And memory is the ink with which we list our crimes.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“He hadn't written the book, but he was in it. He had literally travelled within its pages, and somehow, those pages reached out for him even now. They reached in some ephemeral way, wound so closely around simple hope that in the next moment he could convince himself that hope was all he had ever been. But no. It was here.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Book That Held Her Heart

“I just wanted to know. That’s who I am. I like to know things. That’s something you should know.”
― Mark Lawrence

“He could hear her voice in his mind, asking him why he was still waiting for his life to begin. All his years of caution, all those years when she had asked him
seemingly every day what he thought he was getting ready for. Those days when she'd told him that the race had already started, and he needed to join in or be left behind. Livira’s advice would be, and always had been, to grab what was before him with both hands. And now she would be saying that if he really had for so long been saving himself for something better, something extraordinary... how was this not it?”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretext of understanding. We paper over the voids in our comprehension with science or religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across 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.”
― Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns

“We are not friends, Jorg of Ancrath," Gorgoth said, deeper than he'd ever spoken. "But we both loved the boy. You loved him first. You named him. That means something.”
― Mark Lawrence

“What does nostalgia mean to a child? An abstraction. A standing stone waiting for them in the mist. Walk a path across some decades, any path you like, and the word will gather weight. It will come to you trailing maybes and might-have-beens. Nostalgia is a drug, a knife. Against young skin it carries a dull edge, but time will teach you that nostalgia cuts—and that it’s a blade we cannot keep from applying to our own flesh.”
― Mark Lawrence

“People don’t choose sides up here.’ He tapped his head. ‘That’s where they think up the reasons for the choice after they’ve made it. The reasons they’re gonna tell everyone. But the truth is that they made the choice here.’ He slapped his chest. ‘We fight for the people we love. We fight for the ideas we want to be true, whether they are or not.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy 3-Book Collection Set - A Spellbinding Saga of Books, Secrets, and Destiny

“Some pain you can distance yourself from, but a headache sits right where you live”
― Mark Lawrence

“Time can stutter, it can drag, crawl, run, race, and, on occasion, fly. But it's favorite form of locomotion has always been to skip. Few lives are lived without the punctuation of moments when we realize with sudden shock that a year, two years, maybe two dozen, have got behind us, sneaking by without permission and propelling us into a future we hardly imagined.”
― Mark Lawrence

“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”
― Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns

“Despite the fact that many of the worst things to ever happen happened in basements, people keep digging them.”
― Mark Lawrence

“The library teaches us how to do this. Over and over again it has taught us enough to know how to burn our world to the bedrock, but not enough to stop us from doing so. There's a point that all societies reach.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“It must be hard, Evar thought, to see real people as having value after taking the lives of so many pretend ones”
― Mark Lawrence

“One of the earliest philosophers told us you can't step in the same river twice. The library taught me that you can't read the same book twice either”
― Mark Lawrence

“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.”
― Mark Lawrence

“You can fly too,” Livira said.
“There’s nothing to it. It’s just a matter of not falling.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Book That Held Her Heart

“Synoth managed a wry smile through his beard. "It's always the books you don't have that call to you, you know that. Not the ones already on your shelf. They can wait"

The Book That Wouldn't Burn, pg 463 ”
― Mark Lawrence