Steven Erikson Quotes

Many children, early on, acquire a love of places they have never been. Often, such wonder is summarily crushed on the crawl through the sludge of murky, confused adolescence on to the flat, cracked pan of adulthood with its airless vistas ever lurking beyond the horizon. Oh, well, sometimes such gifts of curiosity, delight and adventure do indeed survive the stationary trek, said victims ending up as artists, scholars, inventors and other criminals bent on confounding the commonplace and the platitudes of peaceful living. But never mind them for now, since, for all their flailing subversions, nothing really ever changes unless in service to convenience.

"We are all lone souls. It pays to know humility, lest the delusion of control, of mastery, overwhelms. And, indeed, we seem a species prone to that delusion, again and ever again."
~Fiddler, pg. 558

There is but one god, and its name is beauty. There is but one kind of worship, and that is love. There is for us but one world, and we have scarred it beyond recognition.

Courting is the art of growing like mould on the one you want.

There are times, Kruppe murmurs, when celibacy born of sad deprivation becomes a boon, nay, a source of great relief.

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.

Your cynicism lies in your willing abuse of others to consolidate your superiority over them. My cynicism is in regard to humanity’s wilful blindness with respect to its own extinction.’

‘Without that wilful blindness there is naught but despair.’

‘Oh, I am not that cynical. In fact, I do not agree at all. Maybe when the wilful blindness runs its inevitable course, there will be born wilful wisdom, the revelation of seeing things as they are.’

‘Things? To which things are you referring, old man?’

‘Why, that everything of true value is, in fact, free.

Seven Cities was an ancient civilization, steeped in the power of antiquity, where Ascendants once walked on every trader track, every footpath, every lost road between forgotten places. It was said the sands hoarded power within their sussurating currents, that every stone had soaked up sorcery like blood, and that beneath every city lay the ruins of countless other cities, older cities, cities that went back to the First Empire itself. It was said each city rose on the backs of ghosts, the substance of spirits thick like layers of crushed bone; that each city forever wept beneath the streets, forever laughed, shouted, hawked wares and bartered and prayed and drew first breaths that brought life and the last breaths that announced death. Beneath the streets there were dreams, wisdom, foolishness, fears, rage, grief, lust and love and bitter hatred.

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

Oh, measure it all out! Acceptable levels of misery and suffering!' The cane swung down, thumped hard on the ground. 'Acceptable? Who the fuck says any level is acceptable? What sort of mind thinks that?'

Karsa grinned, 'Why, a civilized one.'

'Indeed!' Shadowthrone turned to Cotillion. 'And you doubted this one!

She asks, and something in your head tells you that what she’s doing is right – and that it’s the only reason she has to live. She asked me to die defending her – knowing I didn’t even like her much. Quick, for the rest of my life, I will never forget that moment.’
‘And you still can’t quite work out what happened.’
The assassin nodded. ‘All at once, it’s as if she’s somehow laid bare your soul and there it is, exposed, trembling, vulnerable beyond all belief – and she could take it, grasp it tight until the blood starts dripping. She could even stab it right through. But she didn’t – she didn’t do any of that, Quick. She reached down, her finger hovered, and then … gone, as if that was all she needed.’
‘You can stop now,’ the wizard muttered. ‘What you’re talking about – between two people – it almost never happens. Maybe it’s what we all want, but Kalam, it almost never happens.’
‘There was no respect in what Laseen offered,’ the assassin said. ‘It was a raw bribe, reaching for the worst in me. But from Tavore …’
‘Nothing but respect. Now I see it, Kal. I see it.

"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."

Oh, measure it all out! Acceptable levels of misery and suffering!’ The cane swung down, thumped hard on the ground. ‘Acceptable? Who the fuck says any level is acceptable? What sort of mind thinks that?

And in the city on all sides, the howling of the Hounds rose in an ear-shattering, soul-flailing crescendo. The Lord of Death had arrived, to walk the streets in the City of Blue Fire.

The future can ever promise but one thing and one thing only: surprises.