Quotes from Steven Erikson

The detonation was deafening, the blast a bruised gout of flame that drove back the airborne sand and the wind carrying it, and flung the attackers and their mounts like a god's hand, backward onto the road and off the sides.

As he made his way back to his estate, Baruk recalled his lone meeting with Vorcan, only a few nights after her awakening. She had entered the chamber with her usual feline grace. The wounds she had borne were long healed and she had found a new set of clothes, loose and

Expectation is the hoary curse of humanity. One can listen to words, and see them as the unfolding of a petal or, indeed, the very opposite: each word bent and pushed tighter, smaller, until the very packet of meaning vanishes with a flip of deft fingers. Poets and tellers of tales can be tugged by either current, into the riotous conflagration of beauteous language or the pithy reduction of the tersely colourless.

We are all worthwhile, sir, once we assume the burden of forgiveness and the effort of absolution.

The rush of the river was a voice, a presence. Water flowed indifferent to the heave and plunge of the sun, the shrouded moon and the slow spin of the stars. The sound reached them in a song without words, and all effort to grasp its meaning was hopeless, for, like the water itself, one could not grasp hold of sound. The flow was ceaseless and immeasurable and just as stillness did not in fact exist, so neither did true, absolute silence.

It may come as a surprise to many humans,' Adam said, and there was a new tone to the disembodied voice, 'but the assumption that an alien civilisation is interested in reaffirming the artificial hierarchy you have imposed upon yourselves is invariably the first one requiring readjustment.

The notion of freedom could make even peace and order seem oppressive, generate the suspicion of some hidden purpose, some vast deceit, some unspecified crime being perpetrated beyond human ken. That was a generous way of looking at it; the alternative was to acknowledge that humans were intrinsically conflicted, cursed with acquisitive addictions of the spirit.

Love could be such a squalid emotion: burning bright in the midst of pathos, the subject of pity and contempt, it blazed with brilliant stupidity all the same.

But blood is the chain that can never break. (...) And, though we leave the house of our birth, it never leaves us.

Rely not upon conscience,' Feren said, hearing the bitterness in her own voice and not caring. 'It ever kneels to necessity.' 'And necessity is often a lie

You weep for this, Trull Sengar, because your love has not been answered, and there is no greater anguish than that.

It is the horror of war that, with each newly arrived generation, the nightmare is reprised by innocents.

Was not love its own shock? A match to that of death? Did it not take the eyes first? Such reverberations as to weaken the bravest man or woman – its trembling echoes never left a mortal soul.

Witch, goodwill is not something that needs an apology. You were betrayed. Your trust was abused. If there are strangers who thrive on such things, they will ever remain strangers – because they have no other choice. Pity Tulas Shorn and those like it.

The more pain you deliver to others, the more shall be visited upon you. You sow your own misery, and because of that whatever sympathy you might rightly receive is swept away.

Proof that the freedoms once accorded non-Letherii peoples were born of both paternalism and a self-serving posturing as a benign overseer. What is given is taken away, just like that.

Do not seek to find hope among your leaders. They are the repositories of poison. Their interest in you extends only so far as their ability to control you. From you, they seek duty and obedience, and they will ply you with the language of stirring faith. They seek followers, and woe to those who question, or voice challenge. 'Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper.

Why is it," Mappo asked, "that Master Quell seemed indifferent to unleashing an undead dragon into this world?" "Well, hardly indifferent. He said 'oops!' At least, I think that's what I heard, but perhaps that was but my imagination.

the siren song/called silence

The Malazan engineers are a unique breed. Cantankerous, foul-mouthed, derisive of authority, secretive and thick-headed. They are the heartstone of the Malazan Army… THE IMPERIAL MILITARY SENJALLE

Gruntle subsided, muttering under his breath. Gods, I wish the world was full of passive, mewling women. He thought about that a moment longer, then scowled. On second thought, what a nightmare that'd be. It's the job of a man to fan the spark into flames, not quench it …

The woman moved in a blur, one elbow driving backwards into the assassin's stomach. She twisted round and drove her knee into the man's crotch. A shout burst from Kalam as he reeled back a step, then fell to the ground with a heavy thump.

I am done with this world, for I am alone in it. Alone.

It was a conceit to imagine that they knew the world; that they knew its every detail. Forces ever worked unseen, in elusive patterns no mortal mind could comprehend.