Quotes from Steven Erikson

Love is a dog rolling on a dead fish.

Cuttle smiled, and then he whispered to them in his mind, You should have seen our last stands. They were something. They were something. Darkness, and then brightness – brightness like a summer day without end. He went there, without a single look back.

Names are no comfort, they're a call to answer the unanswerable. Why did she die, not him? Why do the survivors remain anonymous—as if cursed—while the dead are revered? Why do we cling to what we lose while we ignore what we still hold? Name none of the fallen, for they stood in our place, and stand there still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown.

Who was Harllo? The man walked to his horse and swung himself into the saddle. He collected the reins. 'I'm not sure,' he said after a moment's consideration. 'The way it started, well, it seemed . . .' he hesitated, and then said, 'he was a boy nobody loved.

Strings for when I'm lying, Fiddler for when I'm telling the truth.

Some people don't go through their lives searching, Smiles. I'm not looking, because I'm not expecting to find anything. You want meaning? Make it up. You want truth? Invent it. Makes no difference, to anything. Sun comes up, sun goes down. We see one, maybe we don't see the other, but the sun doesn't care, does it?

Stupid people always had a reason to be angry but didn't have the capacity to understand that they were angry because they were frustrated, and they were frustrated because they didn't understand, and they didn't understand because they were stupid.

She is perhaps wiser than we think,' Prazek observed after making a scene of swallowing. 'This sausage mocks the pretence. But,' he added, spearing another piece, 'I am assured that it lodges in the pit of the belly, and remains silent, if not unobtrusive, until the moment of its rebirth into the world.

Kruppe is wise – wise enough to keep silent when silence is called for, and yet wiser still to speak when wise words are required. Wisdom, after all, is Kruppe's blood brother.

And now he was full of words, full of thoughts that had nowhere to go. He imagined that this was what it meant to be lonely. An entire inner world with no way out, no audience or witnesses. If there was beauty in there, none could see it. If there was torment, no one could hear the cries for help.

Here be the mountains vanishing in the mists, never to return. Here be the rivers sinking into the sands, and these are the sands that never rest. And the sky that looks down and sees nothing. Here, aye, is the world behind me, for I was never much of a map-maker, never much the surveyor of deeds.

You have ever been my favourite,' he said, looking away. 'Your favourite what?' 'High Priestess, of course. What else might I be thinking?' 'Well, that is the eternal question, isn't it?' 'One too many people spend too much time worrying about.' 'You cannot be serious, Anomander.

Hope persists, and its voice is compassion, and honest doubt.

To live is to lose the faith you were born with to a thousand cuts, each year bleeding into the next. The eyes of the innocent see a world very differently from what you and I see. To know this is to revisit one's own loss, eye to eye with sad reflection, and to feel once more that dreadful ache in your chest.

Udinaas had known many for whom certainty was a god, the only god, no matter the cast of its features. And he had seen the manner in which such belief made the world simple, where all was divisible by the sharp cleaving of cold judgement, after which no mending was possible.

Truths, yes. One after another, one boulder settling down, then another. And another. Blotting out the light, darkness closing in, grit and sand sifting down, a solid silence when the last one is in place. Now, dear fool, try drawing a single breath. A single breath. There were clouds closed fast round the moon. And one by one, gardens died.

Would've made a good Emperor, I said. Not wanting the job is the best and only qualification worth considering

You do not trust her?" "Of course I trust her. And my trust is made purer by her ignorance.

It's fucking raining dragons.   Quick

that each city forever wept beneath the streets, forever laughed, shouted, hawked wares and bartered and prayed and drew first breaths that brought life and the last breaths that announced death. Beneath the streets there were dreams, wisdom, foolishness, fears, rage, grief, lust and love and bitter hatred. The

Everyone saw her as such a capable person, and all the while she asked herself: capable of what? Will I ever find out? When is it my turn?

Yet, when it's done, what is the once-soldier? What does he or she become? An entire future spent walking backward, eyes on the past – its horrors, its losses, its grief, its sheer heart-bursting living?

Such was my journey Leagues across centuries In one blink of the sun.

And what value is all that pride you seek, Rhulad Sengar? You mortals baffle me. It is a fool's curse, to measure oneself in endless dissatisfaction.