Quotes from Steven Erikson

Take a thousand soldiers. Four hundred will stand in a fight but do nothing. Two hundred will run given the chance. Another hundred will get confused. That leaves three hundred you can count on. Your task in commanding that thousand is all down to knowing where to put that three hundred.

I admit,' said Spite, 'to a certain melancholy when visiting vibrant cities, as is this Darujhistan. A long life teaches one just how ephemeral is such thriving glory. Why, I have come again upon cities I knew well in the age of their greatness, only to find crumbled walls, dust and desolation.' Cutter bared his teeth and said, 'Darujhistan has stood for two thousand years and it will stand for another two thousand-even longer.' Spite nodded. 'Precisely.

Against ignorance there is no front line. Against viciousness no border can hold. It breeds as readily behind your back as elsewhere.

Some roads were easier to leave than others. Many walked to seek the future, but found only the past. Others sought the past, to make it new once more, and discovered that the past was nothing like the one they'd imagined. One could walk in search of friends, and find naught but strangers. One could yearn for company but find little but cruel solitude.

What I was is not what I am. Two men, identical faces, but different eyes. In what they have seen, in what they reflect upon the world.

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. A civilization can as easily drown in what it knows as in what it doesn't know.

Something's nibbling my spleen!

There are times, Kruppe murmurs, when celibacy born of sad deprivation becomes a boon, nay, a source of great relief.

Corporal Clasp crawled up beside him. 'That's one of those Fuckeral's, isn't it?

Logic is simply the language of convenient rationalization in a pseudo-science-loving civilization.

The Lady takes most mortals unto her bosom by maladies of the colon." "Death by constipation?

Behold, my friends, I am justice. And when at last we meet, you will not like it. And if irony awakens in you at the end, see me weep with these tears of jade, and answer with a smile. If you've the courage. Have you, my friends, the courage?

The end of the world is announced with a kind word.

An end to my fear of being alone. An end to a soul's solitude, when death at last arrives. There is something in that, something in there, that comforts.

A man possessing power must act decisively, Ganoes Paran. Else it trickle away through his fingers.

Absolution – yes, I grasp the notion, but absolution is not the same as redemption, is it? The former is passive. The latter demands an effort, one with implicit sacrifice and hardship, one demanding all the higher qualities of what we call virtues.

The righteous will claim sole domain on judgement. The righteous are the first to make hands into fists, the first to shout down dissenters, the first to bully others into compliance.

Can you live without answers? All of you, ask that of yourself. Can you live without answers? Because if you cannot, then most assuredly you will invent your own answers and they will comfort you. And all those who do not share your view will by their very existence strike fear and hatred into your heart. What god blesses this?

Even the beasts succumb to such aggression. Killers among your kind, among my kind, are just that – the savagery of beasts mated with intelligence, or what passes for intelligence. They dwell in a murky world, sir, confused and fearful, stained dark with envy and malice. And in the end, they die as they lived. Frightened and alone, with every memory of power revealed as illusion, as farce.

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

He had been born into debt, as had his father and his father before him. Indenture and slavery were two words for the same thing.

He had told himself that it was an act of courage to let her go, to give her the final decision. Courage and sacrifice. He no longer believed that. There was no sacrifice made in being abandoned. There was no courage in doing nothing.

There were no ugly gods. Their first expression of power was in the reshaping of their selves, into forms lovely to behold.

Do you recognize the Warren, Tool?" "Warrens, Adjunct. Tellann, Thyr, Denul, D'riss, Tennes, Thelomen Toblakai, Starvald Demelain . . ." "Starvald Demelain, what in Hood's Name is that?" "Elder." "I thought there were but three Elder Warrens, and that's not one of them." "Three? No, there were many, Adjunct, all born of one. Starvald Demelain.