Steven Erikson Quotes

• An item that passes without provenance, pursued by many who thirst for it's cold kiss, on which life and all that lay within life are often gambled. Alone, a beggar's crown. In great numbers, a king's folly. Weighted with ruin, yet blood washes from it beneath the lightest rain, and to the next no hint of its cost.
• The tiger is humbled by memories of prey. (Final thoughts of Treach, the Tiger of Summer)
• '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.'
• 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.
• 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.
• To grieve is the gift of the living - a gift so many of our kin have long lost
• 'Wise words are like arrows flung at your forehead. What do you do? Why, you duck of course.'
• '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.'
• 'From the sun-drenched south slopes of Gris, where grow the finest grapes this world has seen. Is mine an informed opinion, you are wondering? Most assuredly so, lass, since I hold a majority interest in said vineyards -'
• 'With ever greater frequency they annihilate themselves, for success breeds contempt for those very qualities that purchased it.'
• 'An army that waits is soon an army at war with itself.'
• 'The future can ever promise but one thing and one thing only: surprises.'
• But now Apsalar was trying to tell him that competence was not justification. That necessity demanded its own path and there was no virtue to be found at its heart.
• 'Not that freedom ensured happiness. Indeed, to be free was to live in absence. Of responsibilities, of loyalties, of the pressures that expectation imposed.'
• 'Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortal's shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched before one now stretched before him.'
• 'You leave me without hope,' Brys said.
• ' Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. and people die.'
• '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.'
• 'Chaos needs no allies, for it dwells like a poison in every one of us.'
• 'If one could always choose the right question, then every answer could be as obvious.'
• 'What war is this?'
• 'Indeed Bugg. is it because, do you think, at the human core, we are naught but liars and cheats?'
• 'You cannot fight unreason, and as these dead multitudes will tell you - are telling you right now - certitude is the enemy.'
• 'Keep a watch out, fools! There are things out there and you know what happens when things arrive!'
• 'I mean the only thing us dead soldiers got in common is that none of us was good enough or lucky enough to survive the fight. We're a host of failures.'
• 'Oh,' the figure settled back down, 'those reasons. Well, yes. Clever, even. But still profoundly stupid.'
• The world, Ahlrada Ahn knew, was indifferent to the necessity of preservation. Of histories, of stories layered with meaning and import. It cared nothing for what was forgotten, for memory and knowledge had never been able to halt the endless repetition of wilful stupidity that so bound peoples and civilizations.
• We are contrary creatures, us humans, but that isn't something we need be afraid of, or even much troubled by. And if you make a list of those people who worship consistency, you'll find they're one and all tyrants or would-be tyrants. Ruling over thousands, or over a husband or a wife, or some cowering child. Never fear contradiction, Cutter, it is the very heart of diversity.
• 'For Hood's sake,' the foreigner muttered. 'What's wrong with words?'
• '- all these Dark Lords intent on creating wastelands packed with enslaved victims ... for what?'

steven erikson