Quotes from Steven Erikson

Your name's now Limp. Aye, not very imaginative, but it's like this. If you can't hear Hood laughing, well, I can.

Never make a roadblock of yourself on trouble's road. No, make yourself a bridge instead, with stones slick as grease.

Yes, gather your disaffected, ignorant fools, then. Fill their heads with the noble glory of a non-existent past, then send them out with their eyes blazing in stupid - but comforting - fervor. And this will begin our new golden age, an exultation in the pleasures of repression and tyrannical control over the lives of everyone. Hail the mighty Errant, the god who brooks no dissent.

She demands nothing, what you do you do for yourselves. You work to earn sustenance. You fight to protect it or to gain more. You work to confound rivals. You fight from fear and hatred and spite and honour and loyalty and whatever other causes you might fashion. Yet, all that you do serves her Ã¢â'¬Â¦ no matter what you do. Not simply benign, Adaephon Delat, but amoral. We can thrive, or we can destroy ourselves, it matters

We are nothing but our own needs. She but showed each of us the face we hide from ourselves and everyone else. She shamed us by exposing our truths.

And here is my secret. Heed this well. The weapon of the godless needs no hand to wield it. The weapon of the godless wields itself. It is without fear. It is empty of guilt and disdainful of retribution. It is all that and more, but one thing it is not: a liar. No slaying in the name of a higher power, no promises of redemption. It will not cloak brutality in the zeal that justifies, that absolves. And this is why it is the most horrifying weapon of all.

Abject misery lies not in what the blanket reveals, but in what it hides.

Oh, Laseen," she murmured, tears welling in her eyes, "I know why we fear this Jaghut Tyrant. Because he became human, he became like us, he enslaved, he destroyed, and he did it better than we could." She lowered her head into her hands. "That's why we fear.

When one can possess loyalty even in the straits of full, brutal understanding, then that one understands all there is to understand about compassion

What's with you all, anyway? You jam a stick up your own arse then preen at how tall and straight your standing.

Stone, sea, forest, city—and every creature that ever lived—all share the same struggle. Being resists unbeing. Order wars against the chaos of dissolution, of disorder.

If there was neither a time before nor a time after, then was not the moment of creation eternal and yet for ever instantaneous?

Every tyranny imaginable is possible when prefaced by the notion that it is for the well-being of the populace.

What see you in the horizon's bruised smear That cannot be blotted out By your raised hand?

Look at these bones we step over. We go as far as we can go, and then we stop. And that is how it is. That is all it is. So…now what?

He spoke to say, 'You cannot war against the man you were, And I cannot slay the man I shall one day become, Our enemy is expectation flung backward and fore, The memories you choose and the tracks I would run. Slayer of dreams, sower of regrets, all that we are.' Soldier at the End of his Days   (fragment) Des'Ban of Nemil

Because they imply a unity that does not exist. Only rarely does a life have a theme, and even then such themes exist in confusion and uncertainty, and are only described by others once that life has come to an end. A tale is the binding of themes to a past, because no tale can be told as it is happening.

When does it happen? All those wounds that ended up making us the adults we are?

The manner in which we gamble defines the stakes. Win or lose, it shall be absolute.' The

None the less, you have my leave, if only that you might ensure your spies are made aware of precisely when her spies make their report, so that they in turn may report to you and you may then report to me. Although what I am to do with such knowledge will no doubt escape me, given that the event initiating these flurries of reporting is none other than the one occurring right now in this room.

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.

Histories, they're just what's survived. But they're not the whole story, because the whole story can never be known. Think of all the histories we've gone and lost. Not just kingdoms and empires, but the histories inside every one of us, every person who ever lived.

Were I not so self-centered, I'd be intrigued. - Tehol Beddict

As with all things, layer settles upon layer, and in time the deepest, darkest ones become forgotten – yet they have shaped all that lies above.