Quotes from Steven Erikson

Emancipor stood in front of the small bush,listening to the birds chirp to greet the morning whilst he emptied his bladder. "Look wel on that yelow, murky stream, Mister Reese—" The manservant started at the voice beside him. "Master! You, uh, surprised me." "Thus reducing you to a trickle.

The failing was that it was so easily won, and therefore became a thing of little worth for the recipient. Could no one see the hurt she felt, each and every time she was cast aside, sorely used, battered by rejection? Did they think she welcomed such feelings, the crushing despond of seeing the paucity of her worth?

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.' And that's why no-one needs to worry, Captain.

But even that word, 'stranger', arose from a time of kin-hearths and a half-dozen huts marking the very limits of a people, a realm, a temporary nest in the seasonal rounds – when we lived in nature and nature lived in us and no other divide existed beyond what was known and what was unknown.

This is not war. This is…what? Errant save us, I have no answer, no way to describe the magnitude of this slaughter. It is mindless. Blasphemous. As if we have forgotten dignity. Theirs, our own. The word itself. No distinction between innocence and guilt, condemned by mere existence.

He drew a ragged breath. 'You ...' Felisin waited, hoping the life would flee this husk, flee it now, before— 'You ... were ... not what I expected ...' Armour can hide anything until the moment it falls away. Even a child. Especially a child.

Humanity's crisis is, it seems, its inability to appreciate gifts freely given.

We are all interludes in history, a drawn breath to make pause in the rush, and when we are gone, those breaths join the chorus of the wind.

She was thinking about how a mind could turn to stone, the patterns solid and immovable in the face of seemingly unbearable pressures, and the way dust trickled down faint as whispers, unnoticed by any.

When memories have returned, Trull Sengar, solitude is an illusion, for every silence is filled by a clamorous search for meaning.

Mages by nature never commanded loyalty. Fear, yes, and the respect born of fear, but the one thing a mage found difficult to understand or cope with was loyalty. And yet there had been one mage, long ago, who had commanded loyalty – and that was the Emperor.

The only death I fear is dying ignorant.

Creation demands destruction. Survival demands that something else fails to survive. No existence was truly benign.

Mother Dark had turned away. She had left them to fates of their own devising, and in so doing, she had taken away their privilege of blaming someone else.

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 . . .

Peace reigned in silence, inside and out, in isolation and exhaustion.

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!

Besides, captain, have you no interest in seeing Lord Henarald's expression when he learns that my master seeks to commission a sword?' Galar Baras's head snapped round in shock.

Language was war, vaster than any host of swords, spears and sorcery. The self waging battle against everyone else. Borders enacted, defended, sallies and breaches, fields of corpses rotting like tumbled fruit. Words ever seeking allies, ever seeking iconic verisimilitude in the heaving press.

Isolation hones the inner voice, the unspoken dialogue between the selves

Pure genius. Why didn't I think of that?' The tone began rising once more. 'Why? Because I'm not an idiot!!

Gifts are rarely appreciated,' Arathan said, and in his mind he was remembering his first night with Feren. 'And the one who receives knows only confusion. At first. And then hunger... for more. And in that hunger, there is expectation, and so the gift ceases being a gift, and becomes payment, and to give itself becomes a privilege and to receive it a right. By this all sentiment sours.

Where flies Korabas, there shall be T'iam.

You were talking to yourself, Udinaas. You shouldn't do that.' 'That's what I keep telling myself.