Steven Erikson - Gardens of the Moon (1999)

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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
Your guest is mundane, a restless personage whose thoughts are thick with greed and treachery. A demon crouches on his shoulder, named Ambition.

Steven Erikson
In the empty eyes of this child, he'd seen the withering of his own soul. The reflection had been unblemished, with no imperfections to challenge the truth of what he saw.

Steven Erikson
Heed the lesson there, son.
What lesson?
Every decision you make can change the world. The best life is the one the gods don't notice. You want to live free, boy, live quietly.
I want to be a soldier. A hero.
You'll grow out of it.

Steven Erikson
Kallor said: I walked this land when the T'lan Imass were but children. I have commanded armies a hundred thousand strong. I have spread the fire of my wrath across entire continents, and sat alone upon tall thrones. Do you grasp the meaning of this?
Yes, said Caladan Brood, you never learn.

Steven Erikson
An item, he said softly, his eyes on the disc, that passes without provenance, pursued by many who thirst for its cold kiss, on which life and all that lay within life is often gambled. Alone, a beggar's crown. In great numbers, a king's folly. Weighted with ruin, yet blood washes from it beneath the lightest rain, and to the next no hint of its cost. It is as it is, says Kruppe, worthless but for those who insist otherwise.

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

Steven Erikson
He had nowhere to look for answers, and he was tired of asking questions.

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

Steven Erikson
Celebrating Gedderone's Rite of Spring shouldn't be an excuse to avoid the pressures of reality. It wasn't just a harmless escape: it was a means of delaying the probable and making it inevitable.

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
Morality was not relative, they claimed, nor even existing solely in the realm of human condition. No, they proclaimed morality was an imperative of all life, a natural law that was neither the brutal acts of beasts nor the lofty ambitions of humanity, but something other, something unassailable

Steven Erikson
I look at you and I see a man because that's what men are capable of—I don't hunt for excuses because I don't like to think that that's how nasty we can get. We look at Sorry and we see reflections of ourselves. Hood take it, if we don't like what we see.

Steven Erikson
All they get around here is stories. Stories don't make you bleed. Stories don't make you go hungry, don't give you sore feet. When you're young smelling of pigshit and convinced there ain't a weapon in all the damn world that's going to hurt you, all stories do is make you want to be part of them.

Steven Erikson
Nor would he recognize hope if it came to him. Too much a stranger, too long a ghost.

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
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
Do I want you to talk to me, old friend? Do I need your reminders, your wry confirmation that faith is for fools?

Steven Erikson
A god intervened, Captain Paran. Returned the life to you. You might think it was on your behalf, but I'm afraid there wasn't any altruism involved. Are you following me?
I'm being used, Paran stated flatly.
She raised an eyebrow. That doesn't bother you?
Paran shrugged and turned away. It's nothing new, he muttered.

Steven Erikson
A title as meaningless as the woman bearing it. The Empress—just another face she'd seen somewhere before, a mask behind which someone hid from mortality.
No use hiding, she whispered, frowning down at the dead leaves and branches around her. No use.

Steven Erikson
Since when is speaking the truth presumptuous?
You are young, aren't you?

Steven Erikson
As for presumption, I honestly couldn't care less. Truth can't be danced around, not out here, not now, not ever again.

Steven Erikson
Ben Adaephon Delat," Pearl said plaintively, "see the last who comes. You send me to my death." "I know," Quick Ben whispered. "Flee, then. I will hold them enough to ensure your escape no more." Quick Ben sank down past the roof. Before he passed from sight Pearl spoke again. "Ben Adaephon Delat, do you pity me?" "Yes" he replied softly, then pivoted and dropped down into darkness.

Steven Erikson
Ambition is not a dirty word. Piss on compromise. Go for the throat.

Steven Erikson
Tell me, Tool, what dominates your thoughts?
The Imass shrugged before replying. I think of futility, Adjunct.
Do all Imass think about futility?
No. Few think at all.
Why is that?
The Imass leaned his head to one side and regarded her. Because, Adjunct, it is futile.

Steven Erikson