Quotes from Steven Erikson

This is Quick Ben's game, O Elder. The bones are in his sweaty hands and they have been for some time. Now, if at his table you'll find the Worm of Autumn, and the once Lord of Death, and Shadowthrone and Cotillion, not to mention the past players Anomander Rake and Dessembrae, and who knows who else, well – did you really believe a few thousand damned Nah'ruk could take him down? The thing about Adaephon Delat's game is this: he cheats.

Every gift is edged.

What is there left to understand? Choice is an illusion. Freedom is conceit. The hands that reach out to guide your every step, your every thought, come not from the gods, for they are no less deluded than we - no, my friends, those hands come to each of us... from each of us.

Against a broken heart, even absurdity falters. Because words fall away. A dialogue of silence. That deafens.

If we are to live,' Rake went on, 'we must take risks. Else our lives become deaths in all but name. There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail - should we fall - we will know that we have lived.

Why is it, I wonder, that organizations such as yours are invariably run by pitiful human failures? By small-minded psychotics and perverts. All bullied as children, of course. Or abused by twisted parents – I'm sure you have terrible tales to confess, of your miserable youth. And now the power is in your hands, and oh how the rest of us suffer.

We should all live a life of hobbies. Doing only what gives us pleasure, only what rewards us in secret, private ways.

You are frowning. Why?' 'Well, I've already killed a god today,' Iron Bars said. 'If I'd known this was going to be a day for killing gods, I might have paced myself better.

What matter the colour of the collar around a man's neck, if the chains linked to them were identical?

Justice without compassion was the destroyer of morality, a slayer blind to empathy.

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?

I am a caster of nets. Tyrants and emperors rise and fall. Civilizations burgeon then die, but there are always casters of nets. And tillers of the soil, and herders in the pastures. We are where civilization begins, and when it ends, we are there to begin it again.

This, then, is friendship. A family you choose. What you give to it, you give freely. What you withhold from it, measures its depth.

The notion of evil for its own sake strikes me as boring -- all these Dark Lords intent on creating wastelands packed with enslaved victims... for what?

Not even the dead know the end to war. -Iskar Jarak

The High Mage scowled. 'All right. Maybe I was trying to scare you. It'll be rough, though. That much is true. And over on the Silanda, Fiddler will be heaving his guts out.' Kalam, thinking on it, suddenly smiled. 'That cheers me up.' 'Me too.

Diversity is worth celebrating, Humbrall Taur, for it is the birthplace of wisdom.

I see no value in modest ambitions - Karsa Orlong

Precision is a precise art. Poignancy is pre-eminent and precludes prevarication.

Morality was not relative, they claimed, nor even existing solely in the realm of the human condition. No, they proclaimed morality as an imperative of all life, a natural law that was neither the brutal acts of beasts nor the lofty ambitions of humanity, but something other, something unassailable.

Whatever evil you let ride becomes commonplace, eventually. Problem is, it's easier to get used to it than carve it out.

We are all interludes in history, a drawn breath to make pause in the rush, and when we are gone, those breaths join the chorus of the wind. But who listens to the wind?

What are gods, after all, if not the perfect victims?

The gods know, happiness is a precious and rare commodity, and indeed it seems that the more intelligent and perceptive the individual, the less happy they generally are. The cost of seeing things as they are, I expect.