Steven Erikson Quotes

To grieve is the gift of the living — a gift so many of our kin have long lost

Memories belong in the soil, in stone, in wind. They are the land's unseen meaning, such that touches the soul of all who would look — truly look — upon it. Touches, in faintest whisper, old, almost shapeless echoes — to which a mortal life adds its own.

Children were meant to be gifts. The physical manifestation of love between a man and a woman. And for that love all manner of sacrifice could be borne.

'They've had a long time to think,' Paran murmured. 'Sometimes, that's all there's needed. The heart of wisdom is tolerance. I think.'

The tiger is humbled by memories of prey.

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

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.”

The power he commanded insisted upon subjects. Strength was ever relative, and he could not dominate without the company of the dominated.

He who would dominate must learn early that those resisting his command should be destroyed.

Prediction had become a privilege now lost to her. Never mind the outside world, she could not even guess her own actions, or the course of her thoughts.
Was this the true nature of emotion? she wondered. The great defier of logic, of control—the whims of being human. What lay ahead?

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.

Paran shook his head, his only surprise the realization that nothing surprised him anymore.

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

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.

“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.”