Steven Erikson Quotes

138 Sourced Quotes

You are very easily exasperated, my dear. If you're a leaf trembling on a wide, deep river, relax and ride the current. It's always worked for me, I assure you.

Steven Erikson
The Empress expects obedience of her servants, and demands loyalty.
Any reasonable ruler would have the expectation and the demand the other way round.

Steven Erikson
I love you still, but with your death I succumbed to a kind of infatuation. I convinced myself that what you and I had, so very briefly, was of far vaster and deeper import than it truly was. Of all the weapons we chose to turn upon ourselves, guilt is the sharpest, Silverfox. It can carve one's own past into unrecognizable shapes, false memories leading to beliefs that sow all kinds of obsessions.

Steven Erikson
Through the gamut of life we struggled for control, for a means to fashion the world around us, an eternal, hopeless hunt for the privilege of being able to predict the shape of our lives.

Steven Erikson
Can you live without answers? All of you, ask that of yourself. Can you live without answers? Because if you cannot, then most assuredly you will invent your own answers and they will comfort you. And all those who do not share your view will by their very existence strike fear and hatred into your heart. What god blesses this?

Steven Erikson
"There's little value in seeking to find reasons for why people do what they do, or feel the way they feel. Hatred is a most pernicious thing, finding root in any kind of soil. It feeds on itself."
"With words."

Steven Erikson
Gods, I wish the world was full of passive women.He thougt for a moment longer, then scowled. On second thoughts, what a nightmare that'd be. It's the job of a man to fan the spark into flames, not quench it...

Steven Erikson
She walked alongside him, saying nothing. Thinking. At last, she sighed. 'It is said that only one's will can fight against chaos, that no other weapons are possible.'

Steven Erikson
Paradise belonged to the innocent. Which was why it was and would ever remain empty. And that is what makes it a paradise.

Steven Erikson
We humans do not understand compassion. In each moment of our lives, we betray it. Aye, we know of its worth, yet in knowing we then attach to it a value, we guard the giving of it, believing it must be earned, T'lan Imass. Compassion is priceless in the truest sense of the wold. It must be given freely. In abundance.

Steven Erikson
'... In elegant remoteness, she arrives like a work of high art, and you may well desire to edge ever closer, seeking flaws in the maker's hand, but the closer you get, the more she blurs before your eyes.'

Steven Erikson
Compassion existed when and only when one could step outside oneself, to suddenly see the bars from inside the cage.

Steven Erikson
Survivors do not mourn together. They each mourn alone, even when in the same place. Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.

Steven Erikson
'Words were no gift, said Haut. They were tangled nets snaring all who ventured into their midst, until an entire people could hang helpless, choking on their own arguments, even as dissolution closed in on all sides.

Steven Erikson
For we are all bound in stories, and as the years pile up they turn to stone, layer upon layer, building our lives.

Steven Erikson
If all we seek is an escape, what does that say about the world we live in. We are desperate with our dreams. What - oh, what - does that say?

Steven Erikson
Power is violence, its promise, its deed. Power cares nothing for reason, nothing for justice, nothing for compassion. It is, in fact, the singular abnegation of these things - once the cloak of deceits is stripped away, this one truth is revealed.

Steven Erikson
All that we were has led us to where we are, but tells us little of where we're going. Memories are a weight you can never shrug off.

Steven Erikson