The Liar's Key Quotes

“Still, children hope in ways adults find hard to imagine. They carry their dreams before them, fragile, in both arms, waiting for the world to trip them.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“Every fortune-teller I ever met was a faker. First thing you should do to a soothsayer is poke them in the eye and say, ‘Didn’t see that coming, did you?”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“Sometimes my lies impressed the hell out of me.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“Throw away too much of your past and you abandon the person who walked those days. When you pare away at yourself you can reinvent, that’s true enough, but such whittling always seems to reveal a lesser man, and promises to leave you with nothing at the end.”
― mark lawrence, The Liar's Key

“A consequence of boredom is that a man is forced to look either to the future or the past, or sideways into his imagination.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“Sixty beats of a heart would be enough. If I could hold them. Let them know I came for them no matter what stood in my way. It would be enough. Sixty beats of a heart past that door would outweigh sixty years in this world without them.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“Fear is a valuable commodity, it’s common sense compressed into its purest form.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“The night can last twenty hours and even when the day finally breaks it never gets above a level of cold I call “fuck that”—as in you open the door, your face freezes instantly to the point where it hurts to speak, but manfully you manage to say “fuck that,” before turning round, and going back to bed.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“A lie can run deeper than strength or wisdom.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“I hit her. I’m not one for hitting women . . . or anyone else for that matter. In fact I’m not one for hitting anything liable to hit back, but given the choice between a hefty man and a slightly built woman I’ll punch out the woman every time.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“If there’s one thing I can’t stand about licentious behaviour, it’s when I’m not involved.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“Give us everything we ask for and suddenly it's too much.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“The breaking of day changes all things, Snorri. Nothing endures beyond the count of the sun. Pile a sufficient weight of mornings upon a thing and it will change. Even the rocks themselves will not outlast the morning.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“A great comfort, Tuttugu. I always like to do my drowning within sight of land.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“The best liars always tell the truth—they just choose which parts.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“I’m only a little ashamed to say I outsprinted the boy. Old habits die hard. It’s good to be faster than what’s chasing you, but really the important thing in running away is to be faster than the slowest of those being pursued. Rule number one: be ahead of the next man. Or child.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“There’s a simple joy in casting a rock into still waters and watching the ripples spread. It’s the thrill of destruction combined with the surety that all will be well again—everything as it was. A stone had fallen into my comfortable existence at court, so large that the waves washed me to the ends of the earth, but perhaps on my return I would find it as before, unchanged and waiting to receive me. Much of what men do in later life is just throwing stones, albeit bigger stones into different ponds.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“You look different,” Snorri said. “I think ‘even more handsome’ was the phrase you were looking for.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“Anything I had to say seemed shallow beside the depth of his grief. Words are awkward tools at best, too blunt for delicate tasks.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“Thor might be god of strength and war, Odin of wisdom, but he sometimes wondered if it wasn’t Loki, the trickster god, who stood behind what unfolded. A lie can run deeper than strength or wisdom. And hadn’t the world proved to be a bitter joke?”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“it’s hard to play the enigmatic prince of romance when the object of your affections gets to watch you shit into the sea twice a day.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“The stars are pretty but the space between them is infinite and black with promise.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“Great emotion, it turns out, is a fire, and like a fire it needs fuel. Unfed it dies down to a hot and banked glow, ready to ignite again but leaving space for other matters.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“What saves us all are the deeds of fools as often as the acts of the wise.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“The road forgets. Make your life a journey, keep moving toward what you want, leave behind anything that’s too heavy to carry. •”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“Snolli!”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“These were bankers we were talking about, and I owed taxes. They’d hunt me to the ends of the earth!”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“Here.’ I held out a silver crown between two fingers to take his mind off it. ‘You can have this coin, or, you can have the most valuable piece of advice I own, something a wise man once told me and I’ve never shared.’ Snorri looked around at that, taking in the two of us with a raised eyebrow. ‘Well?’ I asked. Hennan furrowed his brow, staring at the coin, then at me, then at the coin. ‘I’ll…’ He reached out, then pulled his hand back. ‘I’ll … the advice.’ He blurted it out as if the words pained him. I nodded sagely. ‘Always take the money.’ Hennan”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar’s Key

“There's a problem with continually stamping down on the least sensible instincts that drive men to recklessly endanger themselves. Even the most reasonable and level-headed of us have only limited space to store such unwanted emotion. You keep putting the stuff away, shoving it to the back of your mind but like an over-full cupboard there comes a point where you try to cram one more thing into it and all of a sudden something snaps, the catch gives, the door bursts open and everything inside spills out on top of you.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key

“I didn’t know what I would do except that Edris Dean would be dead at the end of it.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Liar's Key