Quotes from Steven Erikson

He knew that the curse haunting him was no different from history's own progression, the endless succession of failures, the puerile triumphs that had a way of falling over as soon as one stopped looking. Or caring. He knew that life itself corrected gross imbalances by simply folding everything over and starting anew.

Do not believe I now owe you, slave." "You will discover," the slave said, moving past the warrior, "that the notion of debt is not so easily denied.

You damned fool, woman. Look at me. I'm alone. Once, I wasn't in a hurry to change that. And then, one day I woke up, and it was too late. Now, alone gives me my only peace, but it ain't a pleasant peace. You two loved each other - any idea how rare and precious that is? You broke yourself and broke him too, I'd think. Listen to me - go find him, Apsalar. Find him and hold onto him - now whose ego tortures itself, eh? There you are, thinking that change can only go one way.

Worship the sacrifice they will make, for they make it in the name of compassion—the only cause worth fighting and dying for.

Varandas squatted opposite Hood. 'What are you doing?' 'I am ending time' 'No wonder it's taking so long.

For a long time, Lostara had concluded that the woman in command of the Bonehunters was simply incapable of revealing her vulnerable side.

It slowly dawned on the thief that a duel was but moments away.

When faiths take knife in hand, surely every god must turn away.

Rage and unbearable pain meshed together like twin strands in an ever-tightening rope.

I, Sergeant Gesler of the 5th squad in the 9th Company of the 8th Legion, swear by the two Lords of Summer, Fener and Treach, that the creature before me is a natural, unaltered Birdshit scorpion – even though I know there's something about it I'm not seeing and I'm about to lose my life's savings on the Sergeants' Wager.

Dying a dozen times in mock battle is nothing. When it's for real you die but once.

And now here I sit, on my brow a circlet of fire, and this kingdom I rule is naught but the host of my life's recollections, unruly subjects, so eager for insurrection, to usurp the aged man from his charred throne and raise up younger versions one by one.

Don't get distracted, Ammanas. Laseen remains our target, and the collapse of the Empire she rules but never earned.

No one lets dead poets lie in peace. We are like old meat on a crowded dinner table.

It is the absence of society that leads to destruction. When concord is lost, when arguments cease and in opposition neither side sees the other as kin, as brother and sister, then all manner of atrocity is possible.

People were the same everywhere, no matter what lofty vows they proclaimed. Help was given only in the hope of its being reciprocated. Expectations of reward lurked behind every act of altruism.

Old men and the dead were the first whisperers of the word vengeance. Old men and the dead stood at the same wall, and while the dead faced it, old men held their backs to it. Beyond that wall was oblivion. They spoke from the end times, and both knew a need to lead the young onto identical paths, if only to give meaning to all they had known and all they had done.

These were the mysteries of men, so baffling to women. Where silences could become a conjoining of paths. Where a handful of inconsequential words could bind spirits in an ineffable understanding. Forces at play that she could sense, indeed witness, yet ever remaining outside them. Baffled and frustrated and half disbelieving.

the question of what is deserved should rarely, if ever, be asked. Asking it leads to deadly judgement, and acts of unmitigated evil. Atrocity revisited in the name of justice breeds its own atrocity

Odd, isn't it? After all, the Warren only appeared following the Emperor's assassination at Laseen's hand. Shadowthrone and his companion the Patron of Assassins – Cotillion – were unheard of before Kellanved and Dancer's deaths. It also seems that whatever . . . disagreement there is between House Shadow and Empress Laseen is, uhm, personal . . .

He could only nod as he tucked the scrap in his belt. He looked at the three figures before him, wishing Bult and List had been present for this, but there would be no staged goodbyes, no comfort of roles to step into. Like everything else, the moment was messy, awkward and incomplete.

Wealth was measured in control over other people, and the grip of that control could never be permitted to loosen. Odd, then, that this rebellion had had nothing to do with such inequities, that in truth it had been little more than a struggle between those who would be in charge.

Not that freedom ensured happiness. Indeed, to be free was to live in absence. Of responsibilities, of loyalties, of the pressures that expectation imposed.

Compassion is not a replacement for stupidity. Tearful concern cannot stand in the stead of cold recognition. Sympathy does not cancel out the hard facts of brutal, unwavering observation. It was too easy, too cheap, to fret and wring one's hands, moaning with heartfelt empathy – it was damned self-indulgent, in fact, providing the perfect excuse for doing precisely nothing while assuming a pious pose. Enough of that.