That's what courage is. Taking your disappointments and your failures, your guilt and your shame, all the wounds received and inflicted, and sinking them in the past. Starting again. Damning yesterday and facing tomorrow with your head held high. Times change. It's those that see it coming, and plan for it, and change themselves to suit, that prosper.

Joe Abercrombie

Categorized in : Past Courage Disappointment

What’s the difference? Fill a hundred pits with dead Northmen, congratulations, have a parade! Kill one man in the same uniform as you? A crime. A murder. Worse than despicable. Are we not all men? All blood and bone and dreams?

Joe Abercrombie

congratulations military dream

You have to learn to love the small things in life, like a hot bath. You have to love the small things, when you have nothing else

Joe Abercrombie

baths things-in-life hot

Have a smile for breakfast, you'll be shitting joy by lunch.

Joe Abercrombie

lunch joy breakfast

It is easy to forget how much you have, when your eyes are always fixed on what you have not.

Joe Abercrombie

eye easy forget

You should laugh every moment you live, for you'll find it decidedly difficult afterwards.

Joe Abercrombie

moments should laughing

I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn to stop making them.

Joe Abercrombie

learning teaching mistake

Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.

Joe Abercrombie

irrelevance lying people

Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter.

Joe Abercrombie

rings men

Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.

Joe Abercrombie

wise life travel

Armour... is part of a state of mind... in which you admit the possibility... of being hit.

Joe Abercrombie

possibility states mind

I've made peace with myself.

Joe Abercrombie

fighting winning war

Chose? If you believe that I chose any part of the pitiful shadow of a life you see before you, you are very much mistaken. I chose glory and success. The box did not contain what was written on the lid.

Joe Abercrombie

shadow glory believe

A friendship between a man and a woman was what you called it when one had been pursuing the other for a long time and never gotten anywhere.

Joe Abercrombie

long-time men long

Sometimes it doesn't matter too much what choice you make, as long as you make it quick and stick to it.

Joe Abercrombie

choices matter long

There was no such thing as luck. Luck was a word idiots used to explain the consequences of their own rashness, and selfishness, and stupidity. More often than not bad luck meant bad plans.

Joe Abercrombie

selfishness stupidity luck

Only it’s just the same. In fact, do you know, because of all that pressure, and worry, and fear, it’s worse. There aren’t many men who think clearest when the stakes are highest. So people are even stupider in a war than the rest of the time. Thinking about how they’ll dodge the blame, or grab the glory, or save their skins, rather than about what will actually work There’s no job that forgives stupidity more than soldiering. No job that encourages it more.

Joe Abercrombie

jobs men war

Names turned over by time, like the plough turning the soil. Bringing up the new while the old were buried in the mud.

Joe Abercrombie

mud soil names

People love to see death. It reminds them that however mean, however low, however horrible their lives become… at least they have one.

Joe Abercrombie

lows mean people

Rules are for children. This is war, and in war the only crime is to lose.

Joe Abercrombie

lawyer war children

I think the further away you get from completing a book, the more responses you see to it from readers, the more your own tastes and opinions shift and the more you start to see things you could have written differently in the detail, or done differently on the broader scale of plot and character.

Joe Abercrombie

character book thinking