The Girl and the Mountain Quotes

“all men make their own gods and those gods tell them only what they want to hear.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Girl and the Mountain

“Steady progress. That was the Ictha way. Any task could be overcome by steady, unrelenting progress.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Girl and the Mountain

“Memory is the scaffold on which we assemble ourselves.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Girl and the Mountain

“each adult would, at a time chosen by the wind, go out and walk the ice alone. The aim of such journeying was to find the kyzat, the perfect place, a spot that on all the ice had been ordained by the Gods in the Sky and in the Sea for that individual alone as the place where all the elements of their life find meaning, giving a vision of such clarity that the air itself becomes ice and the wisdom of Sky and Sea finds a place in the seeker’s heart, allowing them to endure the hardships of the years ahead. Quell had admitted to Yaz in a private moment that his own journey to find his kyzat, a walk that had lasted four days, had brought him to an ice spike at the juncture of three pressure ridges. Here he was visited by the epiphany that, having run out of his allotted ration of angel-fish, if he did not turn back he would lose first his toes then his fingers to the wind. Yaz had wondered if that wasn’t the wisdom that the ritual was designed to impart. That there is nothing but ice and more ice, and that if you are too stubborn to admit it and turn back, you will die and your malcontent will no longer burden your clan.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Girl and the Mountain

“Survival has a value, has a price—but if that price is too high then it shouldn’t be paid, because what you purchase at such a cost is worthless.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Girl and the Mountain

“The Missing are a fifth tribe,” Theus said. “Part of the first wave to leave humanity’s home world an age before those who came here from the four systems. I was part of the final ascension that emptied Abeth long before the new tribes arrived, but some of my parents’ sect escaped the purification and managed to hide in the northern ice. It’s not a place to thrive. Their descendants remained a handful, leading primitive lives. I don’t know when or how they met the newcomers but they were not recognized and in time their bloods mingled, though their line stayed in the north.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Girl and the Mountain

“technology” until she’d heard it from Eular’s lips, but her time with Erris supplied the meaning: a cleverness embodied in things, in machines.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Girl and the Mountain

“You put in the effort not for the reward you got now, but for the reward you hoped would lie at the end.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Girl and the Mountain

“Living would be replaced by existing.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Girl and the Mountain