Steven Erikson Quotes

The door flew open, carrying into the room a gust of steamy air and then Trotts.

My God," Hadrian said. "They finally did it! All those oh-so-cute-my-cuddly-kitten-here's-a-pic bastard! They finally went and did it!

Something's nibbling my spleen!

Knowledge is not enough. It never is. It's the capacity to do something with that knowledge. To do it perfectly. Absolute timing. With devastating consequences.

All thrones should be made of ice, I think.

Sit on that numb arse, sinking down and down, with the puddle of dissolution getting ever wider around you. Sit, dear ruler, and tell me all your grand designs.

The world outside is in flux - your love of ignorance is not worthy of these precipitous times. Attend this field, travelers, or remain lost at your peril.

War needs no gods, only mortal contestants, two enemies and whatever reasons they invent in order to justify killing each other.

Cutter rubbed at his face. He needed a shave. And a bath. And clean, new clothes. And a purpose in life.

When we war against nature, we war against ourselves. There is no distinction, no dividing line, no enemy. We devour everything in a lust for self-destruction. As if that is intelligence's only gift.

What are gods, after all, if not the perfect victims?

Around Karsa Orlong, I suspect, only Karsa Orlong has his way.

«Such is the irony of life,» Kruppe proclaimed, raising one pastry-filled hand over his head, «that one learns to distrust the obvious, surrendering instead to insidious suspicion and confused conclusion. But, is Kruppe deceived? Can an eel swim? Hurrah, these seeming muddy waters are home to Kruppe, and his eyes are wide with wonder.»

The two men, Tiste and Azathanai, had begun forging something between them, and whatever it was, it was unafraid of truths.

Whatever evil you let ride becomes commonplace, eventually. Problem is, it's easier to get used to it than carve it out.

A man does not marry a girl, nor a woman. He marries a promise, and it shines with a bright purity that is ageless. It shines, in other words, with the glory of lies. The deception is self inflicted. The promise was simple in its form, as befitted the thick-headedness of young men, and in its essence it offered the delusion that the present moment was eternal; that nothing would change; not the fires of desire, not the flesh itself, not the intense look in the eye.

We do naught but scratch the world, frail and fraught. Every vast drama of civilizations, of peoples with their certainties and gestures, means nothing, affects nothing. Life crawls on, ever on.

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.

There is no point in honoring the dead. I have seen too much to believe otherwise.
Grieve for lost potential, the end of possibilities, the eternally silence demise of promise.
Grieve for that, Fear Sengar, and you will understand, finally, how grief is but a mirror, held close to one's own face.

Fiddler turned in his seat and met his corporal's dark eyes. Trouble? Maybe. The exchange was silent, a product of years fighting side by side. Crokus

The rush of the river was a voice, a presence. Water flowed indifferent to the heave and plunge of the sun, the shrouded moon and the slow spin of the stars. The sound reached them in a song without words, and all effort to grasp its meaning was hopeless, for, like the water itself, one could not grasp hold of sound. The flow was ceaseless and immeasurable and just as stillness did not in fact exist, so neither did true, absolute silence.

Compassion is never enough. Nor is the hunger for vengeance. But, for now, for what awaits us, perhaps they will do. We are the Bonehunters, and sail to another name. Beyond Aren, beyond Raraku and beyond Y'Ghatan, we now cross the world to find the first name that will be truly our own. Shared by none other. We sail to give answer.

Then Anomander turned to Gripp Galas. 'Old friend, long have you served me, with valour and with honour. As my most trusted servant I have set my weight upon you, and not once heard from you a word of complaint. You have dressed my wounds on the field of battle. You have mended the damage of my clumsy youth. Did you truly believe that now, on this fraught day, I would once more draw tight this leash? We are all weakened by distress, and indeed it seems every tender emotion lies exposed and trembling to a forest of knives. Gripp Galas, old friend, your service to me ends here and it ends now. You have won the heart of a woman who in all things is nothing less than breathtaking. If love needs permission, I give it. If your future with Lady Hish can be served by any sacrifice within my ability, I give it.' He set his gaze upon Hish Tulla. 'Nothing need be asked and nothing need be surrendered by you, my lady. On this, of all days, I will see love made right.' He swung into the saddle. 'Go well, my friends. We are done here.

Kruppe nodded. Kruppe is no fool, K'rul. He openly opposes no one, and he finds power a thing to be avoided at all costs.

There were many kinds of freedom, and the most precious ones were secret.

Accord dissolves but blame is impossible to assign, leading to malaise, confusion and a vacuous resentment.

Paranoia's the assassin's bedmate,

Everyone was broken inside. It was just that some were more broken than others, and when they were broken bad inside, it was all they could do to keep the outside looking normal.

Innocence was a blade of glory, yet it could blind on both sides.

None of these visions of creation did more than serve the vanity of those holding them. As if all was made for them; for their eyes to witness, for their wonder to behold. Rint did not believe it. The past had no beginning. Something always existed before, no matter how far back one reached.

Three husbands and two sons, ten coin apiece a year. Five of ten's fifty. Fifty coin a year's cold company, lass. Cold in winter, cold in bed.

Kallor shrugged. '[ ... ] I have 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.

The woman moved in a blur, one elbow driving backwards into the assassin's stomach. She twisted round and drove her knee into the man's crotch. A shout burst from Kalam as he reeled back a step, then fell to the ground with a heavy thump.

To live a hard life was to make solid and impregnable every way in, until no openings remained and the soul hid in darkness, and no one else could hear its screams, its railing at injustice, its long, agonizing stretches of sadness. Hardness without created hardness within.

Sadness was, she well knew, not something that could be cured. It was not, in fact, a failing, not a flaw, not an illness of spirit. Sadness was never without reason, and to assert that it marked some kind of dysfunction did little more than prove ignorance or, worse, cowardly evasiveness in the one making the assertion. As if happiness was the only legitimate way of being. As if those failing at it needed to be locked away, made soporific with medications; as if the causes of sadness were merely traps and pitfalls in the proper climb to blissful contentment, things to be edged round or bridged, or leapt across on wings of false elation.

Scillara knew better. She had faced her own sadness often enough. Even when she discovered her first means of escaping it, in durhang, she'd known that such an escape was simply a flight from feelings that existed legitimately. She'd just been unable to permit herself any sympathy for such feelings, because to do so was to surrender to their truth.

Sadness belonged. As rightful as joy, love, grief and fear. All conditions of being.

Too often people mistook the sadness in others for self-pity, and in so doing revealed their own ha

The slower your path, the muddier your boots?'
'Even so,' Icarium said, nodding.
'Time is nothing like that.'
'Are you so certain? When we must wait, our minds fill with sludge, random thoughts like so much refuse. When we are driven to action, our current is swift, the water seemingly clear, cold and sharp.

Regaining control of the gelding, Fiddler drove his heels into its flanks. They bolted forward, savagely riding down the group's generous leader.

The end of the world is announced with a kind word.

THE VEIL OF CIVILISATION was thin indeed, so easily torn away to reveal depravity waiting beneath, waiting, as such things always did, for the first hint of turbulence.

I shall call him Tufty.

Envy shrugged. 'Can no value be found in good intentions?'
'What, precisely, are you trying to justify? And to me, or yourself?'
She glared, then quickened her pace. 'You're no fun at all,' she sniffed as she pulled
ahead, 'and presumptuous as well. I'm going to talk with Tool, his moods don't
swing!'
No, they just hang there, twisting in the wind.

Aye, Master. Only, how do we know where that dhenrabi might take us?"
"Oh, we know that, most certainly. Why, the dhenrabi breeding beds, of course." "Oh.

This is Quick Ben's game, O Elder. The bones are in his sweaty hands and they have been for some time. Now, if at his table you'll find the Worm of Autumn, and the once Lord of Death, and Shadowthrone and Cotillion, not to mention the past players Anomander Rake and Dessembrae, and who knows who else, well – did you really believe a few thousand damned Nah'ruk could take him down? The thing about Adaephon Delat's game is this: he cheats.

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.

It was pathetic, the raving accusations of an ego blind to its own lies.

Isolation hones the inner voice, the unspoken dialogue between the selves

One day, perhaps, you will see for yourself that regrets are as nothing. The value lies in how they are answered.

An end to my fear of being alone. An end to a soul's solitude, when death at last arrives. There is something in that, something in there, that comforts. Hood,

Nostalgia was like a disease, one that crept in and stole the colour from the world and the time you lived in. Made for bitter people. Dangerous people, when they wanted back what never was.

The heavy infantry stood. The heavy infantry held the trench. Even as they died, they backed not a single step. The Nah'ruk clawed for purchase on the blood-soaked mud of the berm. Iron chewed into them. Halberds slammed down, rebounded from shields. Reptilian bodies reeled back, blocking the advance of rear ranks. Arrows and quarrels poured into the foe from positions behind the trench.
And from above, Locqui Wyval descended by the score, in a frenzy, to tear and rend the helmed heads of the lizard warriors. Others quickly closed to do battle with their kin, and the sky rained blood.

Mistress to these footprints
Lover to the wake of where
He has just passed,
for the path he wanders
is between us all.

The sweet taste of loss
feeds every mountain stream,
Failing ice down to seas
warm as blood
threading thin our dreams.

For where he leads her
has lost its bones,
And the trail he walks
is flesh without life
and the sea remembers nothing.

With the Black Company series Glen Cook single-handedly changed the face of fantasy - something a lot of people didn't notice and maybe still don't. He brought the story down to a human level, dispensing with the cliché archetypes of princes, kings, and evil sorcerers. Reading his stuff was like reading Vietnam War fiction on peyote.

Take a thousand soldiers. Four hundred will stand in a fight but do nothing. Two hundred will run given the chance. Another hundred will get confused. That leaves three hundred you can count on. Your task in commanding that thousand is all down to knowing where to put that three hundred.

He waited a moment, as they walked side by side through the camp, and then asked, 'Sir, if there's something we can't handle how do we handle it anyway?' She either grunted or laughed from the same place that grunts came from. 'Sawtooth wedges and keep going, Beak. Throw back whatever is thrown at us. Keep going, until ... ' 'Until what?' 'It's all right, Beak, to die alongside your comrades. It's all right. Do you understand me?' 'Yes sir, I do. It is all right, because they're my friends.' 'That's right, Beak.

Emerging onto the main level, Mappo and Fiddler were accosted with the harsh echo of a shouting voice, bouncing down the hallway from the altar chamber.

We are not simple creatures. You dream that with memories will come knowledge, and from knowledge, understanding. But for every answer you find, a thousand new questions arise. All that we are has lead us to where we are, but tells us little of where we're going. Memories are a weight you can never shrug off.

Trull Sengar kills, and kills, and then, when it is done and he kneels in the blood of the kin he has slain, he weeps.

And then he saw the chains, snapping down through the clouds to crack thunderously on the horizon. Hundreds of chains, impossibly huge, black, whipping in the air with explosions of red dust, crisscrossing the sky. Horror filled his soul.

That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words. Quote me, Duiker, and your work's done.

If you never knew
the worlds in my mind
your sense of loss
would be small pity
and we'll forget this on the trail.
Take what you're given
and turn away the screwed face.
I do not deserve it,
no matter how narrow the strand
of your private shore.
If you will do your best
I'll meet your eye.
It's the clutch of arrows in hand
that I do not trust
bent to the smile hitching my way.
We aren't meeting in sorrow
or some other suture
bridging scars.
We haven't danced the same
thin ice
and my sympathy for your troubles
I give freely without thought
of reciprocity or scales on balance.
It's the decent thing, that's all.
Even if that thing
is a stranger to so many.
But there will be secrets
you never knew
and I would not choose any other way.
All my arrows are buried and
the sandy reach is broad
and all that's private
cools pinned on the altar.
Even the drips are gone,
that child of wants
with a mind full of worlds
and his reddened tears.
The days I feel mortal I so hate.
The days in my worlds,
are where I live for ever,
and should dawn ever arrive
I will to its light awaken
as one reborn.

Poet's Night iii.iv
The Malazan Book of the Fallen
Fisher kel Tath

Wise words are like arrows flung at your forehead. What do you do? Why, you duck of course.

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

Too old to dream of perfection, perhaps, she had instead discovered a certain delicious appeal in flaws.

What is there left to understand? Choice is an illusion. Freedom is conceit. The hands that reach out to guide your every step, your every thought, come not from the gods, for they are no less deluded than we - no, my friends, those hands come to each of us ... from each of us.

Evil is nothing but a word, an objectification where no objectification is necessary. Cast aside this notion of some external agency as the source of inconceivable inhumanity - the sad truth is our possession of an innate proclivity towards indifference, towards deliberate denial of mercy, towards disengaging all that is moral within us.
But if that is too dire , let's call it evil. And paint it with fire and venom.

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

Ammanas slipped noiselessly forward until he was on the other side of the corpse. 'It's her, isn't it.'
'It is.'
'How many times do our followers have to die, Cotillion?' the god asked, then sighed. 'Then again, she clearly ceased being a follower some time ago.'
'She thought we were gone, Ammanas. The Emperor and Dancer. Gone. Dead.'
'And in a way, she was right.'
'In a way, aye. But not in the most important way.'
'Which is?'
Cotillion glanced up, then grimaced. 'She was a friend.'
'Ah, that most important way.

Innocence is only a virtue, lass, when it is temporary. You must pass from it to look back and recognize its unsullied purity. To remain innocent is to twist beneath invisible and unfathomable forces all your life, until one day you realize yourself, and it comes to you that innocence was a curse that had shackled you, defeated your every expression of living.

There's no certainty in this, Baruk. That seems a fact particularly galling to you humans.

And now the page before us blurs.
An age is done. The book must close.
We are abandoned to history.
Raise high one more time the tattered standard
Of the Fallen. See through the drifting smoke
To the dark stains upon the fabric.
This is the blood of our lives, this is the
Payment of our deeds, all soon to be
Forgotten.
We were never what people could be.
We were only what we were.
Remember us

I'm sure they were good men, the ones you lost." "Good at dying," he said.

He'd stood amidst the ranks more than once, sensing the soldiers alongside him seeking and finding that place in the mind, cold and silent, the place where husbands, fathers, wives and mothers became killers. And practice made it easier, each time. Until it becomes a place you never leave.

Indeed, he had come to suspect that no hero, no matter what the time or the circumstance, was anything like the tales told him so many years ago. Or perhaps it was his growing realization that so many so-called virtues, touted as worthy aspirations, possessed a darker side. Purity of heart also meant vicious intransigence. Unfaltering courage saw no sacrifice as too great, even if that meant leading ten thousand soldiers to their deaths. Honour betrayed could plunge into intractable insanity in the pursuit of satisfaction. Noble vows could drown a kingdom in blood, or crush an empire into dust. No, the true nature of heroism was a messy thing, a confused thing of innumerable sides, many of them ugly, and almost all of them terrifying.

It must be taken as given that a man who happens to be the world's most powerful, most terrible, most deadly sorceror, must have a woman at his side. But it does not follow, my children, that a woman of similar proportions requires a man at hers.

The notion of freedom could make even peace and order seem oppressive, generate the suspicion of some hidden purpose, some vast deceit, some unspecified crime being perpetrated beyond human ken. That was a generous way of looking at it; the alternative was to acknowledge that humans were intrinsically conflicted, cursed with acquisitive addictions of the spirit.

Strange how a land untraveled can look so familiar"
Mappo blinked, the memories scattered by the sound of that familiar soft voice. He glanced up at Icarium. "Stranger still how the mind's eye can travel so far and so fast, yet return in an instant"
The Jhag smiled. "With that eye you might explore the entire world"
"With that eye you might escape it".

Why is it," Mappo asked, "that Master Quell seemed indifferent to unleashing an undead dragon into this world?"

"Well, hardly indifferent. He said 'oops!' At least, I think that's what I heard, but perhaps that was but my imagination.

Speak truth, grow still, until the water is clear between us.

The detonation was deafening, the blast a bruised gout of flame that drove back the airborne sand and the wind carrying it, and flung the attackers and their mounts like a god's hand, backward onto the road and off the sides.

The courage of husbands is directly proportionate to the proximity of the wife.

Victory tastes sweetest in the absence of haunting memories, Bult. Savor it.

Omens are for fools, but every truth of the future resides in the present, if only we have the will to see

There exists an exchange of trust between the ruler and the ruled. Abuse that from either direction and all mutual agreements are nullified.

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 ...

By that argument, is not the opposite equally true? That what we reject ceases. That 'truth' is born in what we seek. That we create in order to believe. That we find only what we have created.

That wonder does not exist outside ourselves?

By our belief, we create the gods. And so, in turn, we can destroy them. With a single thought. A moment's refusal, an instant's denial.

If there was neither a time before nor a time after, then was not the moment of creation eternal and yet for ever instantaneous?

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.

The wine is gone. Only sour wine fumes remain. Drunkenness pretends to resolution.

Without eyes to see and without a mind to make order out of chaos, and so bring comprehension, such a world was where the gods went to die. Nothing witnessed, and so nothing renewed. Nothing seen, and so nothing found. Nothing outside, and so nothing inside.

Now these ashes have grown cold, we open the old book.
These oil-stained pages recount the tales of the Fallen,
a frayed empire, words without warmth. The hearth
has ebbed, its gleam and life's sparks are but memories
against dimming eyes - what cast my mind, what hue my
thoughts as I open the Book of the Fallen
and breathe deep the scent of history?
Listen, then, to these words carried on that breath.
These tales are the tales of us all, again yet again.
We are history relived and that is all, without end that is all.

Conviction is a fist of stone at the heart of all things. Its form is shaped by sure hands, the detritus quickly swept from view. It is built to withstand, built to defy challenge, and when cornered it fights without honour. There is nothing more terrible than conviction.

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?

There were no ugly gods. Their first expression of power was in the reshaping of their selves, into forms lovely to behold.

For Hood's sake,' the foreigner muttered. 'What's wrong with words?' 'With words,' said Redmask, turning away, 'meanings change.' 'Well,' Anaster Toc said, following as Redmask made his way back to his army's camp,.. 'that is precisely the point. That's their value - their ability to adapt -' 'Grow corrupt, you mean. The Letheri are masters at corrupting words, their meanings. They call war peace, they call tyranny liberty. On which side of the shadow you stand decides a word's meaning. Words are the weapons used by those who see others with contempt. A contempt which only deepens when they how those others are deceived and made into fools because they choose to believe. Because in their naivety they thought the meaning of a word was fixed, immune to abuse.

There are tides beneath every tide
And the surface of water
Holds no weight.

Where would we go, then, Skintick? We don't even know where we are. What realm is this? What world lies beyond this forest? Cousin, we have nowhere else to go.'

'Nowhere, and anywhere. In the circumstances, Nimander, the former leads to the latter, like reaching a door everyone believes barred, locked tight, and lo, it opens wide at the touch. Nowhere and anywhere are states of mind. See this forest around us? Is it a barrier, or ten thousand paths leading into mystery and wonder? Whichever you decide, the forest itself remains unchanged.

Words are like coin - it pays to hoard."
"Until you die on a bed of gold," Paran said.

It pays to know humility, lest the delusion of control, of mastery, overwhelms.

Giving advice to a child is like flinging sand at an obsidian wall. Nothing sticks. The brutal truth is that we each suffer our own lessons - they can't be danced round. They can't be slipped past. You cannot gift a child with your scars - they arrive like webs, constricting, suffocating, and that child will struggle and strain until they break. No matter how noble your intent, the only scars that teach them anything are the ones they earn themselves.

His route to them met with one obstacle after another as he negotiated his way across the room, excusing himself at every turn and twist.

Stop talking like a sailor, Adjutant Stormy,' Nok said. A smile amidst the red, bristling beard. 'Ain't no Adjutant any more, Admiral.' Thin brows rose, and Nok said, 'Title alone gifts the bearer with intelligence?' Stormy nodded. 'That it does, sir. Which is why Gesler's a sergeant and I'm a corporal. We get stupider every year that passes.' 'And

The hot west wind that blew like sand whispering across stone.