Steven Erikson Quotes

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What matter the colour of the collar around a man's neck, if the chains linked to them were identical?

Steven Erikson
The Wickans know that the gift of power is never free. They know enough not to envy the chosen among them, for power is never a game, nor are glittering standards raised to glory and wealth. They disguise nothing in trappings, and so we all see what we'd rather not, that power is cruel, hard as iron and bone, and thrives on destruction.

Steven Erikson
'Wisdom did not belong to mortals, and those whom others called wise were only those who, through grim experience, had touched the very edges of unwelcome truths. For the wise, even joy was tinged with sorrow. No, the world made its demands upon mortals and they were immediate ones, pressingly, ferociously so, and even knowing a reasonable course was not enough to alter a mad plunge into disaster.'

Steven Erikson
Have any of these thoughts been my own? Look at me—my every move seems a desperate search for someone to blame, always someone else. I've made being a tool of a god an excuse, a justification for not thinking, for simply reacting. And others have died for it.

Steven Erikson
History meant nothing, because the only continuity was human stupidity. Oh, there were moments of greatness, of bright deeds, but how long did the light of such glory last? From one breath to the next, aye, and no more than that. No more than that. As for the rest, kick through the bones and wreckage for they are what remain, what lasts until all turn to dust.

Steven Erikson
Should you ever outrun the guilt within your past, Sorceress, you will have outrun your soul. When it finds you again it will kill you.

Steven Erikson
Soldiers are issued armour for their flesh and bones, but they must fashion their own for their souls. Piece by piece. (Itkovian)

Steven Erikson
As with most unwitting servants of the gods, once the game was done so was the servant's life.

Steven Erikson
But now Apsalar was trying to tell him that competence was not justification. That necessity demanded its own path and there was no virtue to be found at its heart.

Steven Erikson
'Just so,' agreed the King. 'So accept the escort, Adjunct, or I shall hold my breath until I achieve a most royal shade of purple.'

Steven Erikson
From the sun-drenched south slopes of Gris, where grow the finest grapes this world has seen. Is mine an informed opinion, you are wondering? Most assuredly so, lass, since I hold a majority interest in said vineyards —

Steven Erikson
Art is the language of the tormented, but the world is blind to that, for ever blind.

Steven Erikson
When you've burned the bridges behind you, don't go starting a fire on the one in front of you.

Steven Erikson
The righteous will claim sole domain on judgment. The righteous are the first to make hands into fists, the first to shout down dissenters, the first to bully others into compliance.

Steven Erikson
Children were meant to be gifts. The physical manifestation of love between a man and a woman. And for that love all manner of sacrifice could be borne.

Steven Erikson
Discipline is as much facing the enemy within as the enemy before you; for without critical judgement, the weapon you wield delivers — and let us not be coy here — naught but murder. And its first victim is the moral probity of your cause.

Steven Erikson
Mappo Trell, I believe motivations prove, ultimately, irrelevant. Upon either side of the battlefield the face grins with blunt stupidity, even as smoke fills the sky from horizon to horizon, even as crops whither and die, even as sweet land turns to salt. Inequity ends, Trell, when no-one and no thing is left standing.

Steven Erikson
The more civilized a nation, the more conformed its population, until that civilization's last age arrives, when multiplicity wages war with conformity. The former grows ever wilder, ever more dysfunctional in its extremities; whilst the latter seeks to increase its measure of control, until such efforts acquire diabolical tyranny.' - Traveller

Steven Erikson
'I can see your reasons, my love. But won't you get thirsty?' — Inscription found beneath capstone of household well, Lakefront District, Darujhistan

Steven Erikson
He was a man who would never ask for sympathy. He was a man who sought only to do what was right. Such people appear in the world, every world, now and then, like a single refrain of some blessed song, a fragment caught on the spur of an otherwise raging cacophony. Imagine a world without such souls. Yes, it should have been harder to do.

Steven Erikson
Play on, mortal. Every god falls at a mortal's hands. Such is the only end to immortality.

Steven Erikson
More than one philosopher has claimed that we ever remain children, far beneath the indurated layers that make up the armour of adulthood. Armour encumbers, restricts the body and soul within it. But it also protects. Blows are blunted. Feelings lose their edge, leaving us to suffer naught but a plague of bruises, and, after a time, bruises fade.

Steven Erikson
'Peace did not serve order; order served peace, and when order became godlike, sacrosant and inviolate, then the peace thus won became a prison, and those who sought their freedom became enemies to order, and in the elimination of such enemies, peace was lost.'

Steven Erikson
He was not a modest man. Contemplating suicide, he summoned a dragon.' Gothos' Folly

Steven Erikson
Such is the vastness of his genius that he can outwit even himself.

Steven Erikson
None could guess my confusion, my host of deluded illusions and elusive delusions! A mantle of marble hiding a crumbling core of sandstone. See how they stare at me, wondering, all wondering, at my secret wellspring of wisdom...' Let's kill him,' Crokus muttered, 'if only to put him out of our misery.

Steven Erikson
I warn you all, hatred is finding fertile soil within me. And in your compassion, in your every good intention, you nurture it.

Steven Erikson
"You leave me without hope," Brys said.
"I am sorry for that. Do not seek to find hope among your leaders. They are the repositories of poison. Their interest in you extends only so far as their ability to control you. For you, they seek duty and obedience, and they will ply you with the language of stirring faith. They seek followers, and woe to those who question, or voice challenge."

Steven Erikson
What makes a Malazan soldier so dangerous? They're allowed to think.

Steven Erikson
Not that freedom ensured happiness. Indeed, to be free was to live in absence. Of responsibilities, of loyalties, of the pressures that expectation imposed.

Steven Erikson