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

Compassion. Love. It was not civilization that birthed these gentle gifts - though its followers might claim otherwise. Nor was civilization the sweetest garden for such things to blossom in - though those trapped within it might imagine it so. No, as far as [Karsa] could see, civilization was a madman's mechanism that, for all its good intentions, ended up ensnaring the gentle gifts, stifling them, leaving them to wander mazes only to die alone and in the dark.

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.

Wisdom did not belong to mortals, and those whom others called wise were only those who, through grim experience, had touched the very edges of unwelcome truths. For the wise, even joy was tinged with sorrow. No, the world made its demands upon mortals and they were immediate ones, pressingly, ferociously so, and even knowing a reasonable course was not enough to alter a mad plunge into disaster.