The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness, #2)

by Joe Abercrombie

You’ll never hold up someone who can’t swim for themselves. In the end, they’ll drag you down with them.

“You can’t change the fact the world’s full of arseholes. You can only change how you deal with them.”

“Whatever it costs,” said Vick. “That’s what His Eminence told me.” Tallow had that worried look again. “Easy to say for him who won’t be paying.”

“What the shit?”

Rare anger can be inspiring. Frequent anger becomes contemptible.”

“Help with strange problems comes from strange people.”

Isern pushed the door creaking open and bright daggers glittered along its edge, stabbing, stabbing. Rikke closed one eye altogether and the other to a slit, groaning as they helped her through the doorway. She felt weak as a newborn calf. Everything hurt. The soles of her feet. The tips of her fingers. The inside of her arse. They helped her onto her father’s favourite bench in the overgrown garden, with the view of Uffrith’s steep streets sloping down to the glittering sea. “Oh, the sun’s a bastard,” she muttered, but she managed to smile as the salt breeze came up and kissed her clammy face. “But the wind’s a good friend.” “Other way around where we’re going,” said Isern, dumping a sheepskin about Rikke’s shoulders. “Up into the hills.” “Everything’s a matter of where you stand.”

“Don’t speak if silence will do,”

Not even a window!

it’s better to do it than live with the fear of it,

“Better to do it than live with the fear of it.”

It was as if all these people were the setting of the ring in which Savine was the jewel.

It’s easy to scream about the fence when you’re on the wrong side of it.

“Prefer to eat the eggs I’ve got, my king, rather’n the ones still up in the tree.”

But here was a man who always looked for the best in folk. Didn’t always find it, but never gave up looking. Wasted no time polishing his own name. Singing his own songs. Didn’t have to. Every man and woman in the North knew his quality.

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” Benjamin Franklin

“You have to be realistic.”

Luck can be quite the dodgy bitch, after all.

Snakes have no friends.

“This is not a game. We must be utterly committed. Fail and we are doomed.”

There was a great dark stain across her face. A tattoo, black runes, black lines, black arrows in a crescent from her cheek, covering one side of her forehead, to the bridge of her nose. Her right eye was turned white with just a milky pinprick in the centre, while the hungry pupil of the left had swallowed the whole iris, yawning like a grave-pit.

That’s the thing about blood. King’s or commoner’s, everyone’s looks much the same.

“It’s not so much what the welcome says about the guest as what it tells the guest about the host.”

If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that there’s rarely any need to wade into the bitter ocean for your vengeance. It’ll wash up on the shore soon enough.”

The spell was broken. The strange moment was gone. Leo had to admit he was relieved. Relieved and crushed, both at once.

“Winning teaches you nothing,” said Tunny. “You see what a man really is when he loses.”

A life of luxury is poor preparation for a beating.

But then the worst betrayals often happen in good weather. When there’s a blizzard blowing, people are too busy huddling together.

Make ’em laugh, you’re halfway there, her father always told her.

“The dead save me from the fucking young.” “No getting away from ’em, sadly,” muttered Clover. “The older you get, the more of ’em there are.”

You can’t get attached to weapons in a battle any more than you can get attached to men. Sometimes you have to leave ’em in the dirt.

So much of failure is a failure to consider the details.”