Steven Erikson Quotes

There is only one thing worse than arguing with a drunk,’ Faradan Sort said, ‘and that’s arguing with a drunk who’s right.

“The mewling, petty acts,” he’d say, “of a short-lived and short-sighted species, Crokus, can do nothing to mar the Great Cycles of Life.”

History, she realized, was mostly lost. No matter how diligent the recorders, the witnesses, the researchers, most of the past simply no longer existed. Would never be known. The notion seemed to empty her out somewhere deep inside, as if the very knowledge of loss somehow released a torrent of extinction within her own memories-moments swirling away, never to be retrieved. She set a finger in one groove etched into the stone, followed its serpentine track downward as far as she could reach, then back up again. The first to do so in how long?

There was an old saying among the Perish that a room full of women was a knife-seller’s vision of paradise. ‘There will be betrayal.’ Oh yes indeed. Betrayal .

Victory is an illusion. In all things.

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.

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

Do not let the title of scholar, or poet, or lord, intimidate you overmuch. More importantly, do not delude yourself into imagining that such men and women are loftier, or somehow cleverer or purer of intgrity or ideal than you or the other commoner. We live in a world of facades, but the grins behind them are all wretched.

So, how many generations of Indebted need to suffer – even as the civilized trappings multiply and abound on all sides, with an ever-increasing proportion of those material follies out of their financial reach? How many, before we all collectively stop and say, “Aaii! That’s enough! No more suffering, please! No more hunger, no more war, no more inequity!” Well, as far as I can see, there are never enough generations. We just scrabble on, and on, devouring all within reach, including our own kind, as if it was nothing more than the undeniable expression of some natural law, and as such subject to no moral context, no ethical constraint – despite the ubiquitous and disingenuous blathering over-invocation of those two grand notions.

The notion of evil for its own sake strikes me as boring — all these Dark Lords intent on creating wastelands packed with enslaved victims... for what?

A pointless, senseless death.’

‘They’re all pointless and senseless, friend. Until the living carve meaning out of them. What are you going to carve, Gruntle, out of Harllo’s death? Take my advice, an empty cave offers no comfort.’

‘I ain’t looking for comfort.’

‘You’d better. No other goal is worthwhile, and I should know. Harllo was my friend as well. From the way those Grey Swords who found us described it, you were down, and he did what a friend’s supposed to do – he defended you. Stood over you and took the blows. And was killed. But he did what he wanted – he saved your hide. And is this his reward, Gruntle? You want to look his ghost in the eye and tell him it wasn’t worth it?’

‘He should never have done it.’

‘That’s not the point, is it?

If holy words could not offer up an answer to despair, then what good were they? If the truths so revealed did not invite restitution, then their utterance was no more than a curse. And if the restitution is found not in the mortal realm, then we are invited to inaction, and indifference. Will you promise to a soul a reward buried in supposition? Are we to reach throughout our lives but never touch? Are we to dream and to hope, but never know?

Bullies learn nothing when bullied in turn; there are no lessons, no about-face in their squalid natures. The principle of righteous justice is a peculiar domain where propriety and vengeance become confused, almost indistinguishable. The bullied bully is shown but the other side of the same fear he or she has lived with all his or her life. The about-face happens there, on the outside, not the inside. Inside, the bully and everything that haunts the bully's soul remains unchanged.

It is an abject truth, but conscience cannot be shoved down the throat.

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

There is something profoundly cynical, my friends, in the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise is excusative. One need not accept responsibility for the world as it is, and by extension, one need do nothing about it. To strive for change, for true goodness in this mortal world, one must acknowledge and accept, within one's own soul, that this mortal reality has purpose in itself, that its greatest value is not for us, but for our children and their children. To view life as but a quick passage alone a foul, tortured path – made foul and tortured by our own indifference – is to excuse all manner of misery and depravity, and to exact cruel punishment upon the innocent lives to come.

I defy this notion of paradise beyond the gates of bone. If the soul truly survives the passage, then it behooves us – each of us, my friends – to nurture a faith in similitude: what awaits us is a reflection of what we leave behind, and in the squandering of our mortal existence, we surrender the opportunity to learn the ways of goodness, the practice of sympathy, empathy, compassion and healing – all passed by in our rush to arrive at a place of glory and beauty, a place we did not earn, and most certainly do not deserve.