Quotes from Steven Erikson

A bone-deep weariness gripped the assassin

Friend, I have remembered something.

On a cobbled beach, a man looks down and sees one rock, then another and another. A woman looks down and sees…rocks. But perhaps even this is simplistic. Man as singular and women as plural. More likely we are bits of both, some of one in the other. We just don't like admitting it.

Paran could feel nothing but the white fire of vengeance, filling his mind, coruscating through his body.

His dying shriek rose skyward.

Sympathy was like water in the desert. Hoarded, reluctantly meted out in the barest of sips. And he, Taralack Veed, could walk a thousand deserts on a single drop.

Wisdom grows by stripping away beliefs, until the last tether is cut, and suddenly you float free.

Kulp saw something crumbling into ruins behind the lad's light-blue eyes.

There would always be, he now understood, those for whom violence was righteous. Sudden

The wagon rolled on, on its way to the mines. Harllo, who so loved the sun, was destined to wake in darkness, and mayhap he was never again to see the day's blessed light.  Out on the lake the water glittered with golden tears. As if the sun might relinquish its hard glare and, for just this one moment, weep for the fate of a child.

That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words. Quote me, Duiker, and your work's done.

His brittle, yellowed bones were splintered, crushed and shattered.

Light exploded behind Felisin's eyes as she sprawled sideways.

Evil speaks in lies. And the good know only one truth. But it's a lie, because there's always more than one truth

He had let age take hold of him, as if ennui was an old man's final gift to himself – the blessed embrace of indifference in the guise of wisdom.

I am as much a scholar as a warrior. T'isten'ur — a name with curious echoes. Tiste Andii, the Dwellers in Darkness. And, more rarely mentioned, and then in naught but fearful whispers, their shadow-kin, the Tiste Edur. Grey-skinned, believed extinct — and thankfully so, for it is a name sheathed in dread. T'isten'ur, the first glottal stop implies past tense, yes? Tlan, now T'lan — your language is kin to that of the Imass. Close kin.

And there was another truth, one that seemed on the surface to contradict the first one. The gentler and kinder the god, the more harsh and cruel its worshippers, for they hold to their conviction with taut certainty, febrile in its extremity, and so cannot abide dissenters. They will kill, they will torture, in that god's name. And see in themselves no conflict, no matter how bloodstained their hands.

There are poets who glory in their recounts of battle, of all those struggles so deftly ritualized. And they tend lovingly their garden of words, heaping high the harvest of glory, duty, courage and honour. But each of those luscious, stirring words is plucked from the same vine, and alas, it is a poisonous one. Name it necessity, and look well upon its spun strands, its fibrous belligerence.

Kuru Qan once told me that grieving had nothing to do with the ones gone, and everything to do with the ones left behind. We feel the absences in our life like open wounds, and they never really close, no matter how many years pass.

The tunnels shrieked with the wind, each one with its own febrile pitch, creating a fierce chorus.

these voices give music to war…

One conversation, here on the surface, yet another beneath. The priest and the mage are playing games, the entwining of suspicion with knowledge. Heboric sees a pattern, his plundering of ghostly lives gave him what he needed, and I think he's telling Kulp that the mage himself is closer to that pattern than he might imagine. "Here, wielder of Meanas, take my invisible hand…" Felisin

That's the thing with Just Wars - they never end and never will because Justice is a weak god with too many names.

Choices fall away, without you even noticing, until there are very few left, and you realize that you are nothing but what you are.