Quotes from Steven Erikson

The three other rickety chairs had been pulled up around the lone table in the room's centre. Above the table hung an oil lantern, which shone down on Fiddler, Hedge and Mallet as they sat playing cards.

The curse of the witless is to beat one's head against the obstinate wall of how things really are, rather than what they insist upon their being.

But the value was an illusion. Hate was a lie that in feeding fills the hater with the feeling of satiation, even as his spirit starves.

He rises bloodless from dust, with dead eyes that are pits twin reaches to eternal pain. He is the lodestone to the gathering clan, made anew and dream-racked. The standard a rotted hide, the throne a bone cage, the king a ghost from dark fields of battle. And now the horn moans on this grey clad dawn drawing the disparate host To war, to war, and the charging frenzy of unbidden memories of ice. - Lay of the First Sword

Kill, thought Ditch, nodding, kill, yes, I understand. I do. Kill, for her. Kill. And he found that the word itself, yes, the word itself, knew how to smile.

knowing his mood was miserable from lack of sleep […], knowing he was unfair […], knowing all these things but unable to stop the dark torrent of his thoughts.

So talk. You can think while you're doing that, since with you the two activities are clearly distinct and mostly unrelated.

They died, Highness, even as they delivered those thirty thousand refugees to safety. They died, but they won.

People will grieve. For the dead, for the living For the loss of innocence and for the surrender of innocence, which are two entirely different things. We will grieve, for choices made and not made, for the mistakes of the heart which can never be undone, for the severed nerve-endings of old scars and those to come.

Every artist was haunted by lies. Every artist fought to find truths. Every artist failed. Some turned back, embracing those comforting lies. Others took their own lives in despair. Still others drank themselves into the barrow, or poisoned everyone who drew near enough to touch, to wound. Some simply gave up, and wasted away in obscurity. A few discovered their own mediocrity, and this was the cruellest discovery of all. None found their way to the truths.

How the time for dreams of the future seemed to slip past unnoticed, until in reviving them a man realized, with a shock, that the privilege was no longer his to entertain, that it belonged to those younger faces he saw on all sides, laughing in the tavern and on the streets, running wild.

His agonized scream rode the cascading waves of power as they swept across the terrace.

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.

The sky cares nothing for you, dear one. The stars don't even see you.

We are, all of us, nothing but impostors to our cause, because the cause we espouse is nothing more than the blind we raise to hide our own ambitions.

Opposite the Half-Axe was the narrow-fronted entrance to a shop devoted to short lengths of rope and wooden poles a man and a half high. Tehol had no idea how such a specialized enterprise could survive, especially in this unravelled, truncated market, yet its door had remained open for almost six centuries, locked up each night by a short length of rope and a wooden pole.

Mortal, yours is a surpassing conceit … which I cannot but applaud.

Dreams can be naught but an imagination's fashioning of its own fears

Men. It's all about saving face. Every argument, every duel, every battle, every war. You would level a world to keep from being made to look a fool. And so you shall.

For all your fears, love is not something you can forget. But you can turn your back on it.

Guilt is the first weed we pluck, to keep the garden pretty and smelling sweet.

I am no critic. Merely a humble observer who, when able, speaks on behalf of the tongue-tied multitudes otherwise known as the commonalty, or, more precisely, the rabble. An audience, understand, wholly incapable of self-realization or cogent articulation, and thus possessors of depressingly vulgar tastes when not apprised of what they truly like, if only they knew it. My meagre gift, therefore, lies in the communication of an aesthetic framework upon which most artists hang themselves

Anomander sighed, and then said, 'Sympathy is not a weakness, Ivis. To grieve for the loss of innocence is to remind yourself that yours is not the only life in this world.

The things said and the things not said. In the space in between, a thousand worlds. A thousand worlds.