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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“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

“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

“Her grandfather said that evil men sought to use any difference to create fear, distrust, and hatred, all of which they would employ to advance their own position.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Book That Held Her Heart

“Fairness is something others try to impose at the surface level once they've fixed all the foundations in their favor.”
― Mark Lawrence

“The stories, though set free on imagination's wings, had to make some kind of sense to prevent the readers' scoffs. Truth, though, didn't care a whit for making sense and could ride roughshod over people's expectations. Truth, it was often said in the library, was stranger than fiction. Livira also considered it uglier, crueler, and ultimately less satisfying.”
― Mark Lawrence

“I guess every generation thinks it’s born into the golden age of music, but that night it was easy to believe that nobody had had it as good as we did.”
― Mark Lawrence

“A fault like this didn’t have neat boundaries. You couldn’t draw a line and say that those standing on this side were blameless and those on the other guilty.”
― Mark Lawrence

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

“All of us in our secret hearts, in our empty moments of contemplation, stumble into the understanding that nothing matters. There’s a cold shock of realisation and, in that moment, we know that nothing at all is of the least consequence. Ultimately, we’re all just spinning our wheels, seeking to avoid pain until the clock winds down and our time is spent. To give someone purpose is to free them, however briefly, from the spectre of that knowledge.”
― 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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“The greatest story can reach the stars…”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy 3-Book Collection Set - A Spellbinding Saga of Books, Secrets, and Destiny