Jonas Dröge > Jonas's Quotes

“Aus alledem ergibt sich die groteske Situation, daß der wirkliche Einsatz, um den es bei dieser blutigen Partie ging, die sich die beiden mächtigsten Königreiche jener Zeit auf Grund einer Laune zweier verliebter Männer lieferten, nichts weiter war als ein Augenaufschlag der Anna von Österreich.”
― Alexandre Dumas, Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers

“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“I’ve fought in three campaigns,” he began. “In seven pitched battles. In countless raids and skirmishes and desperate defences, and bloody actions of every kind. I’ve fought in the driving snow, the blasting wind, the middle of the night. I’ve been fighting all my life, one enemy or another, one friend or another. I’ve known little else. I’ve seen men killed for a word, for a look, for nothing at all. A woman tried to stab me once for killing her husband, and I threw her down a well. And that’s far from the worst of it. Life used to be cheap as dirt to me. Cheaper.

“I’ve fought ten single combats and I won them all, but I fought on the wrong side and for all the wrong reasons. I’ve been ruthless, and brutal, and a coward. I’ve stabbed men in the back, burned them, drowned them, crushed them with rocks, killed them asleep, unarmed, or running away. I’ve run away myself more than once. I’ve pissed myself with fear. I’ve begged for my life. I’ve been wounded, often, and badly, and screamed and cried like a baby whose mother took her tit away. I’ve no doubt the world would be a better place if I’d been killed years ago, but I haven’t been, and I don’t know why.”

He looked down at his hands, pink and clean on the stone. “There are few men with more blood on their hands than me. None, that I know of. The Bloody-Nine they call me, my enemies, and there’s a lot of ’em. Always more enemies, and fewer friends. Blood gets you nothing but more blood. It follows me now, always, like my shadow, and like my shadow I can never be free of it. I should never be free of it. I’ve earned it. I’ve deserved it. I’ve sought it out. Such is my punishment.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself

“Honour, eh? What the hell is that anyway? Every man thinks it's something different. You can't drink it. You can't fuck it. The more of it you have the less good it does you, and if you've got none at all you don't miss it.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Before They Are Hanged

“Well. What can we do, except try to do better?”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself

“Sometimes it doesn't matter too much what choice you make, as long as you make it quick and stick to it.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

“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.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold

“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.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Red Country

“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?”
― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

“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.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold

“You don’t know this yet, darling, because you haven’t experienced that moment when the twisting squeezing crush of your muscles and the urge to expel and to scream at once results in this small mass of humanity that squalls and breathes and comes to rest against your stomach, naked to your nakedness, dependent upon you, blind at that moment, hands instinctively trying to clutch. And once you close those fingers round one of your own…no, not even then…once you look at this life that you’ve created, you know you’ll do anything, suffer anything, to protect it. Mostly for its own sake you protect, of course, because all it is really is living, breathing need. But partly you protect it for your own.”
― Elizabeth George, Missing Joseph

“Kinder stehlen einem mehr als das Herz, mein Liebes. Sie stehlen einem das Leben. Sie holen das Schlechteste und das Beste aus uns heraus und schenken uns dafür ihr Vertrauen. Aber der Preis ist hoch und der Lohn gering, und es dauert lang bis man ihn ernten kann. Und am Ende, wenn man sich darauf vorbereitet, das Kind ins Erwachsenenleben zu entlassen, tut man es in der Hoffnung, dass das was zurück bleibt, größer - und mehr -sein wird als die leeren Hände einer Mutter.”
― Elizabeth George, Missing Joseph

“I will hate the man you choose because he isn't me, and love him if he makes you smile.”
― Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.”
― Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch