Best Served Cold

by Joe Abercrombie

“To have a good enemy, choose a friend: he knows where to strike”

but his brother used to tell him it was what you gave out that made a man, not what you got back.

Enough pain makes a coward of anyone.

“I doubt you understand how much I am helping you.” He squeezed tighter and tighter. “One cannot grow without pain. One cannot improve without it. Suffering drives us to achieve great things.” The fingers of her good hand plucked and scrabbled uselessly at his fist. “Love is a fine cushion to rest upon, but only hate can make you a better person.

Maybe it was what you gave out that made a man, not what you got back, like Shivers’ brother used to say, but getting back’s a mighty good thing to stop you starving.

“Men become accustomed to poison by degrees”

“If you’re a good man, and you try to think about what the right thing is every day of your life, and you build things to be proud of so bastards can come and burn them in a moment, and you make sure and say thank you kindly each time they kick the guts out of you, do you think when you die, and they stick you in the mud, you turn into gold?”

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

“Steer me down the righteous path. Then you can be good and rich at once.” “I’m starting to doubt a man can be both.”

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

“Regrets. The cost of the business,

“In our line of work, enemies are things to be proud of. If experience has taught the two of us anything, it’s that your friends are the ones you need to watch.

Never fear your enemies, Verturio wrote, but your friends, always.

When God means to punish a man, the Kantic scriptures say, he sends him stupid friends, and clever enemies.

Convicts, in the main, are wonderfully polite. Bad manners can be fatal in prison.

“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.”

“In truth, I always had dire judgement on every issue. That is what has made my life such a series of thrills.”

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.

“Not much honour in it,” said Shivers. “Shit at least makes flowers grow. Honour isn’t even that useful.”

“What happens when you get old, though, and no one wants you no more? Seems to me all you’re doing is putting off the despair and leaving a pack of regrets behind you.” Below Cosca’s mask, his smile had a sad twist. “That’s all any of us are doing, my friend. Every business is the same, and ours is no different. Soldiering, killing, whatever you want to call it. No one wants you when you get old.”

“It’s always a crying shame when honest people are betrayed. When it happens to the treacherous, though, one cannot avoid a certain sense of… cosmic justice.”

That was the strange thing about games of chance. The chances were always against the player. You might beat the numbers for a day, but you could never beat them in the end.

In my experience, life rarely turns out the way you expect. We must bend with the circumstances, and simply do our best.”

But the decided habits of a whole life, especially a wasted life, were hard to change.

“War without fire is as worthless as sausages without mustard”

Blunt counsel is a valuable thing to powerful men.

A man who says little to his friends will say less than nothing to his enemies.”

It’s always the poor who are crushed under rich men’s ambitions. And yet they rarely complain, because… well…”

If you wanted a thing, why burn it? And if you did not want it, why fight to take it from someone else?

Mercy and cowardice are the same.

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.

Since his earliest remembrances, Morveer seemed always to have had an uncanny aptitude for saying the wrong thing. When he meant to contribute, he would find he was complaining. When he intended to be solicitous, he would discover he was insulting. When he sought earnestly to provide support, he would be construed as undermining. He wanted only to be valued, respected, included, and yet somehow every attempt at good fellowship only made matters worse.

Strong leaders might like it when someone brings ’em a better idea, but weak ones never do.

There’s nothing worse’n too much plan, that’s true. But too little comes in close behind.

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

“I’ve spent most of my life in prison.” “Where you did more to spread honesty among Styria’s most dangerous convicts than all the magistrates in the land, I do not doubt!” Cosca slapped Friendly on his shoulder. “Honest men are so very rare, they are often mistaken for criminals, for rebels, for madmen. What were your crimes, anyway, but to be different?” “Robbery the first time, and I served seven years. When they caught me again there were eighty-four counts, with fourteen murders.” Cosca cocked an eyebrow. “But were you truly guilty?” “Yes.” He frowned for a moment, then waved it away. “Nobody’s perfect. Let’s leave the past behind us.”

“My curse on fucking causes! Nothing but big excuses. I never saw men act with such ignorance, violence and self-serving malice as when energised by a just cause.”

Monza turned her head and spat. Speeches. Better to move fast and hit hard than waste time talking about it.

It took a man with a bloated sense of himself to think his words might make all the difference.

“Huh. ‘Desperation bakes heroes from the most rotten flour,’ Farans wrote.”

“That’s not your reputation.” “People are more complicated than their reputations, General Murcatto.

entirely see and understand the pointlessness and waste of it all, yet I do it anyway. Does that make me worse or better than the man who does it thinking himself ennobled by a righteous cause? Or the man who does it for his own profit, without the slightest grain of thought for right or wrong? Or are we all the same?”

“I have spent half my life in the business of destruction. The other half in the dogged pursuit of self-destruction. I have created nothing. Nothing but widows, orphans, ruins and misery, a bastard or two, perhaps, and a great deal of vomit. Glory? Honour? My piss is worth more, that at least makes nettles grow.”

“Still, 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. I am a back-to-front man, Sergeant Friendly!”

man can forgive all manner of faults in beautiful women that in ugly men he finds entirely beyond sufferance.

He had observed that people often state the obvious when distressed.

“Fury, paranoia and epic self-centredness in the space of a single sentence.” “All the fine qualities a great military leader requires…”

‘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.’

I swear, the more you give a man, the more he demands, and the less happy he becomes. No one ever appreciates what he gets for nothing.

‘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.”