Best Served Cold

by Joe Abercrombie

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

Good steel bends, but never breaks. Good steel stays always sharp and ready. Good steel feels no pain, no pity and, above all, no remorse.

Large words and bluster and hairy-chested manliness. Too much gets boring with great speed, but a little can sometimes make me smile.

No plague spreads quicker than panic, Stolicus wrote, or is more deadly.

“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness”

“Friendly is your name? Are you a philanthropist?” “A convict.” “I see no reason why a man cannot be both. My thanks in any case. Now if you could just point us in the direction of a tavern—”

Like a befouled homing pigeon, the drunk returns ever to the bottle, unable to change. It is their one route of escape from the misery they leave in their wake. For them the sober world is so crowded with old failures and new fears that they suffocate in it. There is a true coward.”

The people far prefer a leader who appears great, Bialoveld wrote, to one who is.

“The memories of our glories fade,” he whispered, “and rot away into half-arsed anecdotes, thin and unconvincing as some other bastard’s lies. The failures, the disappointments, the regrets, they stay raw as the moments they happened. A pretty girl’s smile, never acted on. A petty wrong we let another take the blame for. A nameless shoulder that knocked us in a crowd and left us stewing for days, for months. Forever.” He curled his lip. “This is the stuff the past is made of. The wretched moments that make us what we are.”

You put a mask on a person, something weird happens. Changes the way they act along with the way they look. Sometimes they don’t seem like people at all no more, but something else.

“I’ve always had a lot of powerful enemies. I consider it a point of pride. Listing them makes excellent dinner conversation.”

“Marvellous!” Cosca clapped his hands. “Streets may boast noble trees, and stately buildings, but they never feel complete without a dusting of corpses, do they?”

“Five times I have been under siege, and always quite relished the experience. It has a wonderful way of limiting the options. Of freeing the mind.” Cosca took a long breath in through his nose and blew it happily out. “When life is a cell, there is nothing more liberating than captivity.”

Too much food for twenty, and there were but three to dine, and two of those not hungry.

To the starving man, bread is beautiful. To the homeless man, a roof is beautiful. To the drunkard, wine is beautiful. Only those who want for nothing else need find beauty in a lump of rock.

“A man sleeps through most of his life, even when awake. You get so little time, yet still you spend it utterly oblivious. Angry, frustrated, fixated on meaningless nothings. That drawer does not close flush with the front of my desk. What cards does my opponent hold, and how much money can I win from him? I wish I were taller. What will I have for dinner, for I am not fond of parsnips?” Shenkt rolled a mangled corpse out of his way with the toe of one boot. “It takes a moment like this to jerk us to our senses, to draw our eyes from the mud to the heavens, to root our attention in the present. Now you realise how precious is each moment. That is my gift to you.”

You make yourself too hard, you make yourself brittle too. Crack once, crack all to pieces.

As a young man I let my passion lead me by the nose, but I have learned numerous harsh lessons in favour of a cool head.

We are entire opposites, like earth and air, yet we are both… missing something… that others take for granted. Some part of that machinery that makes a man fit into society. But we each miss different cogs on the wheel. Enough that we may make, perhaps, between the two of us, one half-decent human.”

I find I can watch without much sentiment. Is it ruthlessness? Is it the fitting detachment of command? Is it the configuration of the stars at my birth? I find myself always sanguine in the face of death and danger. More so than at any other time. Happy when I should be horrified, fearful when I should be calm. I am a riddle, to be sure, even to myself.

‘War is but the pricking point of politics. Blades can kill men, but only words can move them, and good neighbours are the surest shelter in a storm.’

‘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.”

Strange, that however tough one’s skin becomes in later life, the wounds of youth never close.

That was the difference between a hero and a villain, a soldier and a murderer, a victory and a crime. Which side of a river you called home.

These are ruthless times we live in, and in ruthless times, mercy and cowardice are entire opposites. We all turn to shit when we die, Monza, but not all of us are shit while we’re alive.

“But chaos is the natural state of things, for men pull always in their own directions. It is those who want the world to march all the same way that give themselves the challenge.”