One Word Kill Quotes

“Truth may often be the first casualty of war, but dignity is definitely the first casualty of disease.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“It’s always a shock, when you’ve been hit by some calamity, to see the world go about its business with perfect indifference.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“In hospital they ask you to rate your discomfort on a scale of ten. I guess it’s the best they can come up with, but it fails to capture the nature of the beast. Pain can stay the same while you change around it. And, like a thumb of constant size, what it blocks out depends on how close it gets to you. At arm’s length a thumb obscures a small fragment of the day. Held close enough to your eye it can blind you to everything that matters, relegating the world to a periphery.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“We might live in a multiverse of infinite wonder, but we are what we are, and can only care about what falls into our own orbit.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“The beauty and the silliness, and how one piece fitted with the next, and how we all dance around each other in a kind of terror, too petrified of stepping on each other’s toes to understand that we are at least for a brief time getting to dance and should be enjoying the hell out of it.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“The magical power of D&D to draw together people who knew things. Who cared about questions that didn’t seem to matter.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“Fear is a strange thing. Along with its close friend, pain, fear is a vital part of the kit that evolution has furnished us with for keeping alive. Part of its effectiveness comes down to how hard it can be to overcome.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“Pain can stay the same while you change around it. And, like a thumb of constant size, what it blocks out depends on how close it gets to you. At arm’s length a thumb obscures a small fragment of the day. Held close enough to your eye it can blind you to everything that matters, relegating the world to a periphery.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“quantum mechanics was clever stuff. Most of it danced to its own tune, but there was still enough fundamental mathematics underlying all the pretty manipulations to keep me interested.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“He died when I was twelve. He also had cancer, but an oncoming train cured him.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“The thing about cancer, and I guess any disaster, is that it doesn’t just go away. You don’t wake up. And, in the end, you just have to get on with things exactly like everyone else does.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“That’s the common thread running through all the diverse hordes of nerds and geeks who turned up to the conventions and gatherings, who queued outside Games Workshop for the latest rulebook. We were all of us consumed by our own imagination, victims of it, haunted by impossibles, set alight by our own visions, and by other people’s. We weren’t the flamboyant artsy creatives, the darlings who would walk the boards beneath the hot eye of the spotlight, or dance, or paint, or even write novels. We were a tribe who had always felt as if we were locked into a box that we couldn’t see. And when D&D came along, suddenly we saw both the box and the key.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“All of us have a shell, a skin between us and the world that we have to break each time we speak to it. Sometimes I wished mine were thinner.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“They say it’s good to share, but in the end, whatever anyone says, we face the real shit alone. We die alone and on the way we shed our attachments.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“ugliness multiplies, and hurt spills over into hurt, and sometimes good things are just the fuel for evil’s fire.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“every generation thinks it’s born into the golden age of music,”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“I suspect most teenage boys could win the hundred metres in an attempt to outdistance parental embarrassment.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“in the great multitude of humanity, creatures like Ian Rust were like the cancer cells among the crush of blood cells in my veins. Rare, but requiring only one to begin to pollute everything around them.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“By the time you’re my age you’ll have seen smart phones, the internet, and watched robots crawl over Mars, but we still won’t have cured the common cold. Or cancer.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“If I was going to die young, I wanted to at least squeeze the juice out of life rather than pick at it. But you can’t change who you are. Not even with a gun to your head.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“my view of the future had narrowed to tunnel vision, aimed squarely at the next week, next month . . . would I have a next year? I was carrying not only the burden of my sickness but the pressure of making something worthwhile of each day now that my towering stack of them had fallen into ruin and left me clutching at each hour as it slipped between my fingers.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“He deserved acne. You want people’s badness to show.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“It doesn’t matter what the doctors say, there’s no fatal disease that doesn’t feel contagious to the person sitting next to you.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“My father had been a mathematician. A famous one. At least as far as any mathematician or scientist not named Einstein can be famous. Other mathematicians in his field knew his name. Nobody else did.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“You didn’t have to spend long in Rust’s company to realise that he had no threshold. He would escalate any situation with startling rapidity to the point where he could count it as a victory, which meant the other party had to lose. His wasn’t a personality built to last.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“Creeping to the telephone in the hall, dialling her number, easing the dial back after each digit so the noise of it resetting wouldn’t bring Mother out as witness. ‘Hi,’ Mia would say. ‘Hi,’ I would say back, voice low, hopefully sounding seductive rather than like a boy scared his mother might come into the hall to ask what he was doing.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“and”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“The ground starts to shake. Small stones dance on the hardpan. Dust lifts around your ankles. You feel the vibrations through the soles of your boots. The ground starts to break. The— Yes, Fineous?’ Simon lowered his hand. ‘Fineous starts to run.’ ‘In any particular direction?’ ‘Away?’ ‘It’s happening all around, as far as you can see.’ ‘Fineous stays where he is, then, and starts to limber up in preparation for running.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“The ground starts to shake. Small stones dance on the hardpan. Dust lifts around your ankles. You feel the vibrations through the soles of your boots. The ground starts to break. The— Yes, Fineous?’ Simon lowered his hand. ‘Fineous starts to run.’ ‘In any particular direction?’ ‘Away?”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill

“muttering reminders to himself. Simon never forgot a thing. He knew pi to more decimal places than any sane person would want to. I sometimes joked that it was an irrational feat of memory. A maths joke. Nobody ever got it.”
― Mark Lawrence, One Word Kill