Best Served Cold

by Joe Abercrombie

Patience is the parent of success,

“Such human refuse might almost evoke pity were they not so utterly repellent. No animal is more predictable. 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.

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.

You are full of passion, but passion without discipline is no more than a child’s tantrum.”

the more of a fool a man is, the less he cares to look like one.

Fact is I’m good at it. As a fighter I’m a man you need to respect. As anything else I’m just a big shiftless fuck

Innocent. Unformed. Full of possibilities. Before they began to make their choices, or had their choices made for them. Before the doors began to close, and sent them down the only remaining path. Before they knelt. Now, for this briefest spell, they could be anything.

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.

“Men can have all manner of deeply held beliefs about the world in general that they find most inconvenient when called upon to apply to their own lives. Few people let morality get in the way of expediency. Or even convenience. A man who truly believes in a thing beyond the point where it costs him is a rare and dangerous thing.”

That old miser would have blown the world up if he thought a penny would fall out.”

“Men are easily replaced. The world is full of them.”