Top 100 Steven Erikson Quotes
#1. All too often cowardice wears the habit of wounded pride.' Anomander
Steven Erikson
#2. No one lets dead poets lie in peace. We are like old meat on a crowded dinner table.
Steven Erikson
#3. Rhizan gathered in writhing clumps at his hands and feet,
Steven Erikson
#4. There is only one thing worse than arguing with a drunk,' Faradan Sort said, 'and that's arguing with a drunk who's right.
Steven Erikson
#5. [ ... ] knowing his mood was miserable from lack of sleep [ ... ], knowing he was unfair [ ... ], knowing all these things but unable to stop the dark torrent of his thoughts.
Steven Erikson
#6. If it is peace you seek then you need only turn and walk away. Leave."
"To leave here is to arrive elsewhere. I cannot retreat from disorder, for it shall surely follow. Peace must be asserted where one finds oneself. Only when discord is resolved will there be peace.
Steven Erikson
#7. The panic that had filled him was subsiding, perhaps having burned itself out.
Steven Erikson
#8. It slowly dawned on the thief that a duel was but moments away.
Steven Erikson
#9. Show me a god that does not demand mortal suffering.
Show me a god that celebrates diversity, a celebration that embraces even non-believers, and is not threatened by them.
Show me a god that understands the meaning of peace. In life, not in death.
Steven Erikson
#10. The longer one lives, the less valued is that life. Why is that?
Steven Erikson
#11. The past is all patterns, and those patterns remain beneath our feet, even as the stars above reveal their own patterns - for the stars we gaze upon each night are naught but an illusion from the past.
Steven Erikson
#12. The courage of husbands is directly proportionate to the proximity of the wife.
Steven Erikson
#13. Indolence takes many forms, but it comes to every civilization that has outlived its will. You know that as well as I. In this case it was an indolence characterized by a pursuit of knowledge, a frenzied search for answers to everything, no matter the value of such answers.
Steven Erikson
#14. Land, domination, pre-emptive attacks - all just excuses, mundane justifications that do nothing but disguise the simple distinction. They are not us. We are not them.
Steven Erikson
#16. For we are all bound in stories, and as the years pile up they turn to stone, layer upon layer, building our lives.
Steven Erikson
#17. 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.
Steven Erikson
#18. Too easy to conclude, with a private sneer, that men were simple. Granted, had they been strangers, they might well be circling and sniffing each other's anuses right now.
Steven Erikson
#19. The spokesman smiled. Ah, but, Kruppe, Gifts are not easily attained, nor are Virtues, nor are Doubts easily overcome, and Hungers are ever the impetus to climbing.
Steven Erikson
#20. There's a sweet promise to giving up, but realizing that demands a journey. One of spirit. You can't walk to Hood's Gate, you find it before you when the fog clears.
Steven Erikson
#21. Never mind the truth. The past is what I say it is. That is the freedom of teaching the ignorant.
Steven Erikson
#22. 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.
Steven Erikson
#23. Faith is a personal accord between a lone soul and that in which it chooses to believe. In any other guise it is nothing more than a thin coat of sacred paint slapped over politics and the secular lust for power.
Steven Erikson
#24. Mortal, yours is a surpassing conceit ... which I cannot but applaud.
Steven Erikson
#26. A bludgeon of wives (surely that must be the plural assignation)!
Steven Erikson
#27. The hillside before them blurred, as if a curtain of wind-blown sand rose before it. A churning wind roiled through this strange mist.
Steven Erikson
#28. There would always be, he now understood, those for whom violence was righteous. Sudden
Steven Erikson
#29. When it is all one can do to simply hold on, then to suffer is to weather a deluge no god can ease
Steven Erikson
#30. The curse of climbing is discovering how great the distance yet to climb.
Steven Erikson
#31. Self-righteous wrath had planted more corpses in the ground than an empire could lay claim to,
Steven Erikson
#32. What matter the colour of the collar around a man's neck, if the chains linked to them were identical?
Steven Erikson
#34. Rely not upon conscience,' Feren said, hearing the bitterness in her own voice and not caring. 'It ever kneels to necessity.
Steven Erikson
#35. I'll not deny I am impressed by your mastery of six warrens, Quick Ben. In retrospect, you should have held back on at least half of what you command." The man made to rise.
"But, Bauchelain," the wizard replied, "I did.
Steven Erikson
#36. The Soletaken was sundering the barrier, its hungry roar deafening in its reverberations.
Steven Erikson
#38. Soldiers have nothing to look forward to, making patience an easy virtue, and sometimes it's not just a virtue but a contest of indifference.
Steven Erikson
#39. Peace reigned in silence, inside and out, in isolation and exhaustion.
Steven Erikson
#40. He wiped sweat from his brow, drew a shaky breath.
Steven Erikson
#41. 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 ...
Steven Erikson
#42. the mind that has convinced itself of its own superiority is incapable of humility, and in the absence of humility, it is incapable of growth.
Steven Erikson
#43. Wind slapped them against the cliff face, then yanked them outward in a biting swirl of airborne sand.
Steven Erikson
#44. Laughing, he'd flung dense clouds of earth and stone skyward to blind them.
Steven Erikson
#45. 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.
Steven Erikson
#46. 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
Steven Erikson
#47. It may be that in the belief of the possibility of redemption, people willingly do wrong. Redemption waits, like a side door, there in whatever court of judgement we eventually find ourselves. Not even the payment of a fine is demanded, simply the empty negotiation that absolves responsibility.
Steven Erikson
#48. A story invites both writer and reader into a kind of superficial ease: we want to slide along, pleasingly entertained, lost in the fictional dream.
Steven Erikson
#49. When one does not know what one seeks, caution is the surest armour.
Steven Erikson
#50. Names are not for the asking, mortal. Names are earned.
Steven Erikson
#51. When wealth ascends to a point where the majority of the poor finally comprehend that it is, for each of them, unattainable, then all civility collapses, and anarchy prevails.
Steven Erikson
#53. Words were numbers were codes were formulae. Words held secret maps, the measuring of paces, the patterns of mortal minds, of histories, of cities, of continents and warrens.
Steven Erikson
#54. He lifted up another card and set it down before him. 'Priest of Life, hah, now that's a good one. Game's done.'
'Who wins?' the Adjunct, her face pale as candlewax, asked in a whisper.
'Nobody,' Fiddler replied. 'That's Life for you.' He suddenly rose, tottered, then staggered for the door.
Steven Erikson
#55. Curious," Bauchelain said. "What is it you wish us to do for you?"
"Usurp the king," Imid Factalo said.
"Usurp, as in depose."
"Right."
"Depose, as in remove."
"Yes."
"Remove, as in kill.
Steven Erikson
#56. The boy walks another soldier, another one bright heart not yet cooled to hard iron
Steven Erikson
#57. His wounds now bear scars, and those scars dull all feeling. You may see that as a flaw, but I assure you, just as the body will protect what was damaged, so too will the soul.
Steven Erikson
#58. When we speak of ancient times, Rud Elalle, we find in our words things far nearer to hand, and all those emotions we imagined new, blazing with our youth, we find to be ancient beyond imagining.
Steven Erikson
#59. The guard's gaze was on him, the eyes hard and piercing.
Steven Erikson
#60. Speak truth, grow still, until the water is clear between us.
Steven Erikson
#63. Barring the necessary brains, of course," Kruppe said, "which is my true skill - though one such as Coll would never understand such abilities, alien as they are to him." Coll
Steven Erikson
#64. I am Crone, eldest of the Moon's Great Ravens, whose eyes have looked upon a hundred thousand years of human folly. Hence my tattered coat and broken beak as evidence of your indiscriminate destruction. I am but a winged witness of your eternal madness.
Steven Erikson
#65. The soul knows no greater anguish than to take a breath that begins with love and ends with grief.
Steven Erikson
#66. Hands were such extraordinary tools, she mused. Tools, weapons, clumsy and deft, numb and tactile. Among tribal hunters, they could speak, a flurry of gestures eloquent in silence. But they could not taste. Could not hear. Could not weep. For all that, they killed so easily.
Steven Erikson
#67. Then darkness swept in around him and he knew no more.
Steven Erikson
#68. Justice without compassion was the destroyer of morality, a slayer blind to empathy.
Steven Erikson
#69. he could see the darkness pulse, and the smell of decay had thickened to a stench.
Steven Erikson
#70. At night ghosts come In rivers of grief, To claw away the sand Beneath a man's feet
Steven Erikson
#72. But history teaches us nothing new. And should I choose to look ahead, to what is yet to come, why, I see a future made most toxic, born on the day society sets the value of wealth above that of lives.' Sandalath
Steven Erikson
#74. Memory did not let go; it remained the net dragged in one's wake, with all sorts of strange things snarled in the knotted strands.
Steven Erikson
#75. Kneels? Falters? Look to the night sky, foolish man, and gauge the victor in the contest between Dark and Light.
Steven Erikson
#76. 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.
Steven Erikson
#77. Rallick followed this by driving his other knife into Orr's chest.
Steven Erikson
#78. Cotillion's response was cool and dry. 'You've always underestimated the Empress. Hence our present circumstances . . .
Steven Erikson
#80. What did he see, I wonder? What avenue opened before him? A sudden way through, an escape from all the torment? Or was it just the venal act of a selfish child, wanting to somehow punish the woman standing before him ... just passing the guilt along, as cowards will do. Well,
Steven Erikson
#81. There were many kinds of freedom, and the most precious ones were secret.
Steven Erikson
#82. You have learned much, Karsa Orlong."
"I have, T'lan Imass. As you shall witness.
Steven Erikson
#83. Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context.
Steven Erikson
#84. Power may have ten thousand faces, but the look in the eyes of every one of them is the same.
Steven Erikson
#85. What's with you all, anyway? You jam a stick up your own arse then preen at how tall and straight your standing.
Steven Erikson
#86. Diversity is worth celebrating, Humbrall Taur, for it is the birthplace of wisdom.
Steven Erikson
#87. The girl stopped to regard him, her small round face slowly coming to mirror Paran's own frown.
Steven Erikson
#88. Why do I hate spiders? Gods, who doesn't? What a stupid question.
Steven Erikson
#90. Reconciliation does not demand that one side surrender to the other. The simple, mutual recognition that mistakes were made is in itself a closing of the divide.
Steven Erikson
#92. Numbness spread, allowing him to move his arms without the stabbing agony that had had him bathed in sweat over the last few hours.
Steven Erikson
#93. Truth cared nothing for stories. The real world was indifferent to what people wanted to be, to how they wanted everything to turn out. Betrayers came from everywhere, including inside his own body, his own mind. He could trust no one, not even himself.
Steven Erikson
#94. And, hovering inches from her throat, was the tip of the warrior's flint sword.
Steven Erikson
#95. As he made his way back to his estate, Baruk recalled his lone meeting with Vorcan, only a few nights after her awakening. She had entered the chamber with her usual feline grace. The wounds she had borne were long healed and she had found a new set of clothes, loose and
Steven Erikson
#96. It was a conceit to imagine that they knew the world; that they knew its every detail. Forces ever worked unseen, in elusive patterns no mortal mind could comprehend.
Steven Erikson
#97. My arms wrapped about little Jala, little sister, hot with fever but the fire grew too hot, and so, in my arms, her flesh cooled to dawn-stone, mother keening - Jala was the ember now lifeless, and from that day, in mother's eyes, I became naught but its bed of ash.
Steven Erikson
#98. How many times, dear traveller, will you walk the same path?
Steven Erikson
#99. One who binds risks getting bound in return. I will not walk that path.
Steven Erikson
#100. She thought to resume crawling, then consciousness slipped away again.
Steven Erikson
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