Steven Erikson Quotes

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

We humans do not understand compassion. In each moment of our lives, we betray it. Aye, we know of its worth, yet in knowing we then attach to it a value, we guard the giving of it, believing it must be earned, T’lan Imass. Compassion is priceless in the truest sense of the wold. It must be given freely. In abundance.

~ Steven Erikson

Save your explanations, I got some questions for you first and you'd better answer them!' [slurred Hellian.] 'With what?' [Banaschar] sneered. 'Explanations?' 'No. Answers. There's a difference-' 'Really? How? What difference?' 'Explanations are what people use when they need to lie. Y'can always tell those,'cause those don't explain nothing and then they look at you like they just cleared things up when really they did the opposite and they know it and you know it and they know you know and you know they know that you know and they know you and you know them and maybe you go out for a pitcher later but who picks up the tab? That's what I want to know.' 'Right, and answers?' 'Answers is what I get when I ask questions. Answers is when you got no choice. I ask, you tell. I ask again, you tell some more. Then I break your fingers, 'cause I don't like what you're telling me, because those answers don't explain nothing!

~ Steven Erikson

Children understood at a very young age that doing nothing was an expression of power. Doing nothing was a choice swollen with omnipotence. It was, in fact, godly.And this, she now realized, was the reason why the gods did nothing. Proof of their omniscience. After all, to act was to announce awful limitations, for it revealed that chance acted first, the accidents were just that--events beyond the will of the gods--and all they could do in answer was to attempt to remedy the consequences, to alter natural ends. To act, then, was an admission of fallibility.

~ Steven Erikson

Shadow is ever besieged, for that is its nature. Whilst darkness devours, and light steals. And so one sees shadow ever retreat to hidden places, only to return in the wake of the war between dark and light.

~ Steven Erikson

From faith,’ replied Emral Lanear, ‘do we not seek guidance?’ ‘Guidance, or the organized assembly and reification of all the prejudices you collectively hold dear?’ ‘You would not speak to us!’ ‘I grew to fear the power of words – their power, and their powerlessness. No matter how profound or perceptive, no matter how deafening their truth, they are helpless to defend themselves. I could have given you a list. I could have stated, in the simplest terms, that this is how I want you to behave, and this must be the nature of your belief, and your service, and your sacrifice. But how long, I wonder, before that list twisted in interpretation? How long before deviation yielded condemnation, torture, death?’ She slowly leaned forward. ‘How long, before my simple rules to a proper life become a call to war? To the slaughter of unbelievers? How long, Emral Lanear, before you begin killing in my name?’ ‘Then what do you want of us?’ Lanear demanded. ‘You could have stopped thinking like children who need to be told what’s right and what’s wrong. You damned well know what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s pretty simple, really. It’s all about harm. It’s about hurting, and not just physical, either. You want a statement for your faith in me? You wish me to offer you the words you claim to need, the rules by which you are to live your lives? Very well, but I should warn you, every deity worthy of worship will offer you the same prescription. Here it is, then. Don’t hurt other people. In fact, don’t hurt anything capable of suffering. Don’t hurt the world you live in, either, or its myriad creatures. If gods and goddesses are to have any purpose at all, let us be the ones you must face for the crimes of your life. Let us be the answer to every unfeeling, callous, cruel act you committed, every hateful word you uttered, and every spiteful wound you delivered.’ ‘At last!’ cried Emral Lanear. ‘You didn’t need me for that rule.

~ Steven Erikson

Chaos needs no allies, for it dwells like a poison in every one of us.

~ Steven Erikson

The stars, they are as the sun. Each star. Every star. And those spheres- they are worlds, realms, each one different yet the same.

~ Steven Erikson

We go to partake of death. And it is in these moments, before the blades are unsheated, before blood wets the ground and screams fill the air, that the futility descends upon us all. Without our armor, we would all weep.

~ Steven Erikson

The nature of conspiracy, which among those who both feared and named it, seemed to always possess at its core a misguided belief in the competence of others, as weighed against the incapacities, real or imagined, of the believer. Therefore, he concluded, the belief in conspiracy was an announcement of the believer's own sense of utter helplessness in the face of forces both mysterious and fatally efficient.

~ Steven Erikson

If not for a dumb beast's incomprehension at its own destruction beneaththe loving hands of two heartbroken children.

~ Steven Erikson

In my dreams I come face to face with myriad reflections of myself, all unknown and passing strange. They speak unending in languages not my own and walk with companions I have never met, in places my steps have never gone. In my dreams I walk worlds where forests crowd my knees and half the sky is walled ice. Dun herds flow like mud, vast floods tusked and horned surging over the plain, and lo, they are my memories, the migrations of my soul.

~ Steven Erikson

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!

~ Steven Erikson

Gods, I wish the world was full of passive women.He thought 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

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

Dour music has its own beauty, for the song of ruin is most fertile.

~ Steven Erikson

None could guess my confusion, my host of deluded illusions and elusive delusions! A mantle of marble hiding a crumbling core of sandstone. See how they stare at me, wondering, all wondering, at my secret wellspring of wisdom...' Let's kill him,' Crokus muttered, 'if only to put him out of our misery.

~ Steven Erikson

Eventually every man reaches a point where every memory is unwelcome

~ Steven Erikson

the siren song/called silence

~ Steven Erikson

The closest I ever got to Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms was when I bought the box game set for the latter (I think this was before the novels came out). I well recall this—we were living in James Bay, in Victoria. We opened the box up and took out the maps while sitting in a Mexican restaurant. Ten minutes later I was as close as I have ever been to publicly burning someone else’s creation…What bothered us was the reworking of every fantasy cliché imaginable, all in one package now, and none of it made sense.

~ Steven Erikson

Laws decide wich forms of oppression are allowed, Lord. And because of that, those laws are servants to those in power, for whom oppression is given as a right over those who have little or no power.

~ Steven Erikson

Awful things, children. Needy, self-centered tyrants, the boys all teeth and firsts, the girls all claws and spit. Gathering into sniveling packs and sniffing out vulnerabilities — and woe to the child not cunning enough to hide their own — the others would close in like the grubby shark they were. Great pastime, savaging someone.

~ Steven Erikson

Gather close, and let us speak of nasty little shits. Oh, come now, we are no strangers to the vicious demons in placid disguises, innocent eyes so wide, hidden minds so dark. Does evil exist? Is it a force, some deadly possession that slips into the unwary? Is it a thing separate and thus subject to accusation and blame, distinct from the one it has used? Does it flit from soul to soul, weaving its diabolical scheme in all the unseen places, snarling into knots tremulous fears and appalling opportunity, stark terrors and brutal self-interest? Or is the dread word nothing more than a quaint and oh so convenient encapsulation of all those traits distinctly lacking moral context, a sweeping generalization embracing all things depraved and breath takingly cruel, a word to define that peculiar glint in the eye—the voyeur to one’s own delivery of horror, of pain and anguish and impossible grief?Give the demon crimson scales, slashing talons. Tentacles and dripping poison. Three eyes and six slithering tongues. As it crouches there in the soul, its latest abode in an eternal succession of abodes, may every god kneel in prayer.But really. Evil is nothing but a word, an objectification where no objectification is necessary. Cast aside this notion of some external agency as the source of inconceivable inhumanity—the sad truth is our possession of an innate proclivity towards indifference, towards deliberate denial of mercy, towards disengaging all that is moral within us.But if that is too dire, let’s call it evil. And paint it with fire and venom.There are extremities of behaviour that seem, at the time, perfectly natural, indeed reasonable. They are arrived at suddenly, or so it might seem, but if one looks the progression reveals itself, step by step, and that is a most sad truth.

~ Steven Erikson

With the Black Company series Glen Cook single-handedly changed the face of fantasy—something a lot of people didn’t notice and maybe still don’t. He brought the story down to a human level, dispensing with the cliché archetypes of princes, kings, and evil sorcerers. Reading his stuff was like reading Vietnam War fiction on peyote.

~ Steven Erikson

The more civilized a nation, the more conformed its population, until that civilization's last age arrives, when multiplicity wages war with conformity. The former grows ever wilder, ever more dysfunctional in its extremities; whilst the latter seeks to increase its measure of control, until such efforts acquire diabolical tyranny.'- Traveller

~ Steven Erikson

A civilization can easily drown in what it knows as in what doesn't know. Consider,' he continued, Gotho's Folly. Gotho's curse was in being too aware - of everything. Every permutation, every potential. Enough to poison every scan he cast on the world. It availed him naught, and worse, he was aware of even that.

~ Steven Erikson

You had the physical bullies and the emotional bullies and they both revelled in destroying lives.No, she had no time for them. But there were others whose strength was of a much rarer kind. Not easy to find, because they revealed nothing. They were quiet. They often believed themselves to be much weaker than they were. But when pushed too hard, they surprised themselves, finding they would not back away another step, that a wall had risen in their souls, unyielding, a barrier that could not be passed. To find one such as this was the most precious of discoveries.

~ Steven Erikson

For Hood's sake,' the foreigner muttered. 'What's wrong with words?' 'With words,' said Redmask, turning away, 'meanings change.' 'Well,' Anaster Toc said, following as Redmask made his way back to his army's camp,.. 'that is precisely the point. That's their value - their ability to adapt -' 'Grow corrupt, you mean. The Letheri are masters at corrupting words, their meanings. They call war peace, they call tyranny liberty. On which side of the shadow you stand decides a word's meaning. Words are the weapons used by those who see others with contempt. A contempt which only deepens when they how those others are deceived and made into fools because they choose to believe. Because in their naivety they thought the meaning of a word was fixed, immune to abuse.

~ Steven Erikson

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

Purest light will blind as surely as absolute darkness.

~ Steven Erikson

The trust I have...for some people...comes down to how well I know them, and then it's a matter of my trusting them to do what I think they're going to do.

~ Steven Erikson

The soul knows no greater anguish than to take a breath that begins with love and ends with grief.

~ Steven Erikson

He waited a moment, as they walked side by side through the camp, and then asked, 'Sir, if there's something we can't handle how do we handle it anyway?' She either grunted or laughed from the same place that grunts came from. 'Sawtooth wedges and keep going, Beak. Throw back whatever is thrown at us. Keep going, until. . .' 'Until what?' 'It's all right, Beak, to die alongside your comrades. It's all right. Do you understand me?' 'Yes sir, I do. It is all right, because they're my friends.' 'That's right, Beak.

~ Steven Erikson

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

Now, invite me in, before I lose my temperature.’‘Temper, you mean.’‘No, temperature. It’s getting chilly.

~ Steven Erikson

People of civilized countenance made much of exposing the soft underbellies of their psyche - effete and sensitive were the brands of finer breeding. It was easy for them, safe, and that was the whole point, after all: a statement of coddled opulence that burned the throats of the poor more than any ostentatious show of wealth.

~ Steven Erikson

Captain! You can't hold them off! I tried! I swear! They've been artificially enhanced, sir! But all the humans died out - there's bones out there by the millions! They were all suffocated by cuteness! The World is full of kiitens, oh the horror!'My God,' Hadrian said. They've finally did it! All those oh-so-cute-my-cuddy-kittens-here's-a-pic bastards! They finally went and did it!

~ Steven Erikson

I have seen the face of sorrowShe looks away in the distanceAcross all these bridgesFrom whence I cameAnd those spans, trussed and archedHold up our lives as we go back againTo how we thought thenTo how we thought we thought thenI have seen sorrow's face,But she is ever turned awayAnd her words leave me blindHer eyes make me muteI do not understand what she says to meI do not know if to obeyOr attempt a flood of tearsI have seen her faceShe does not speakShe does not weepShe does not know meFor I am but a stone fitted in placeOn the bridge where she walksLay of the BridgeburnersToc the Younger

~ Steven Erikson

What makes a Malazan soldier so dangerous? They’re allowed to think.

~ Steven Erikson

He fashioned an empire of sorts, bereft of cities yet plagued with the endless dramas of society, its pathetic victories and inevitable failures. The community of enslaved Imass thrived in this quagmire of pettiness. They even managed to convince themselves that they possessed freedom, a will of their own that could shape destiny. They elected champions. They tore down their champions once failure draped its shroud over them. They ran in endless circles and called it growth, emergence, knowledge. While over them all, a presence invisible to their eyes, Raest flexed his will. His greatest joy came when his slaves proclaimed him god – though they knew him not – and constructed temples to serve him and organized priesthoods whose activities mimicked Raest’s tyranny with such cosmic irony that the Jaghut could only shake his head.

~ Steven Erikson