Quotes from Steven Erikson

and among those that came from the vaulted heavens of silver, the Tiste Andii, dwellers of Darkness in the Place before Light, Black Dragons numbering five, and in their league sailed red-winged Silanah, said to dwell among the Tiste Andii in their Fang of Darkness descending from the vaulted heavens of silver

with each night they fell back farther, closer to that place where the will to live surrendered to a profound peace.

Brood, you and I, we have fought the Malazans as liberators in truth. Asking no coin, no land. Our motives aren't even clear to us – imagine how they must seem to the Empress? Inexplicable. We appear to be bound to lofty ideals, to nearly outrageous notions of self-sacrifice. We are her enemy, and I don't think she even knows why.

There is nothing just in death. When the moment arrives, it is always too soon. The curse of incompletion, the loss that can never be filled. Before too long, rising like jagged rocks from the flood, there was anger.

We are all naught but twists of suffering in a river of pain.

Indeed, his vision was failing him in all things. It was an old man's curse, he believed, to witness the horizons on all sides drawing ever closer.

It was then, Duiker saw as his mount picked a careful path through the bodies, that madness had truly arrived. Men had been gutted, their entrails pulled out, wrapped around women—wives and mothers and aunts and sisters—who had been raped before being strangled with the intestinal ropes. The historian saw children with their skulls crushed, babies spitted on tapu skewers.

Man or woman, disparaging love is a crime of the soul, for which the future will turn away its face.

You don't destroy an omen by fighting it. No, you do the opposite. You swallow it whole.

Dimness of thought and lack of introspection made many humans less than human, surrendering their precious gifts to a headlong plunge forward, always forward. He'd had his own benighted years, when he would proclaim that he lived only for the present. He had willed himself stupid, because it was an easy thing to do.

Similarly clad women stood by the muddy well, pausing in their endless dunking of cats – a bemusing activity, its symbolism lost on the man as he hurried past.

Madness was a gift. Even as memories were a curse.

Maiden, mother and grandmother, a progression through time—" "Discounting the drudgery spent as wife. Wisdom unfurls like a flower in a pile of dung.

Rellock wants to go back to fishing, hee hee! But the place you left is not what you return to, oh no. From one day to the next, never mind years. Rellock's done work guided by the hands of gods, yet he dreams of dragging nets, with the sun on his face and lines between his toes! He is the heart of the Empire - Laseen should take note! Take note!

A defense based on the weakness of nature belongs to untutored children and dogs that bite, Captain.

Power and immunity, a most deadly combination.

Beware the leader who has nothing to lose.' Her people were proud of their wise sayings. And yet now, in their mortal silence, wisdom and pride proved a perfect match in value. Namely: worthless.

Indeed, with words. Form an opinion, say it often enough and pretty soon everyone's saying it right back at you, and then it becomes a conviction, fed by unreasoning anger and defended with weapons of fear. At which point, words become useless and you're left with a fight to the death.

Self-avowed destinies wear a thousand masks and not one of them truly fits—" "How can they, Hull Beddict, when they're modelled on perfection?

My evening star. If the sun burned out tomorrow, your flame would light the world.

When love turned into a game, people got hurt

Will you accept that suffering defies boundaries and that pain carves no line in the sand?

Kruppe has always considered you mere aspects of himself, a half-dozen Hungers among many, as it were. Yet, for all your needs, you would urge what of your master? That he turn back from his flight, of course. That one's own skull is too worthy a chamber for deception to reign—and yet Kruppe assures you from long experience that all deceit is born in the mind and there it is nurtured while virtues starve.

A releasing of said tension, a dying of the sparks. I now fear getting depressed." "The risk of achieving what you wish for.