Red Country (First Law World, #6)

by Joe Abercrombie

To be brave among friends was nothing. To have the world against you and pick your path regardless – there is courage.

and a face so deep-lined you could’ve used it for a plate rack.

you should laugh every moment you live, for you’ll find it decidedly difficult afterward.

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

‘Never own a thing you couldn’t swim a river with, old Corley Ball used to tell me.’ ‘What happened to him?’ asked Shy. ‘Drowned, as I understand.’ ‘Men rarely live by their own lessons,’ murmured Lamb,

The bottle’s a shifty banker – it might lend you courage but it’s apt to call the debt in sudden.

Folk she’d known to be big on religion had tended to use it as an excuse for doing wrong rather’n a reason not to.

Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with 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.

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

No man capable of greater evil than the one who thinks himself in the right. No purpose more evil than the higher purpose.

Conscience is a burden we choose to bear. Morality is the lie we tell ourselves to make its bearing easier.

Sometimes it’s better to do a thing than live with the fear of it.

If there was a God, the world seemed exactly the way it would be if there wasn’t one.