Quotes from Steven Erikson

Is there a difference between spilled blood and blood squeezed out slowly, excruciatingly, over the course of a foreshortened lifetime of stress, misery, anguish and despair – all in the name of some amorphous god that no-one dares call holy? Even as they bend knee and repeat the litany of sacred duty?

There was value in pain, if only to remind oneself that one still lived

Her worship was founded on denial, and in the absence of a true relationship with her goddess, she – like all those who had come before her – was free to invent every detail of that mock relationship.

All breaks in the narrative of living had more to do with the limits of what could be sustained at any one time, the reach of temporary exhaustion. Memory did not let go; it remained the net dragged in one's wake, with all sorts of strange things snarled in the knotted strands.

A nose in the air just made it easier to cut the throat beneath it. And when it came to that choice, why, he never hesitated. As sure as any force of Nature.

There are beliefs that constitute the official religion of a nation, but those beliefs and that religion are in truth little more than the thinnest gold hammered on far older bones. No nation is singular, or exclusive—rather, it should not be, for its own good. There is much danger in asserting for oneself a claim to purity; whether of blood or of origin. Few may acknowledge it, but Lether is far richer for its devouring minorities, provided that digestion remains eternally incomplete.

Symmetry, lad, is a power unto itself. It is the expression, if you will, of nature's striving for balance.

He felt something crumbling inside him. A fortress in the desert of my heart, I should have known it would be a fortress of sand.

Emerging onto the main level, Mappo and Fiddler were accosted with the harsh echo of a shouting voice, bouncing down the hallway from the altar chamber.

To carry a child is to age in one's bones. To weary one's blood. To stretch skin and flesh. Birthing splits a woman in two, the division a thing of raw agony. Splitting young from old. And the child needs, and the mother gives.

It is not the same. Nothing ever is, beginning with ourselves.

It pays to know humility, lest the delusion of control, of mastery, overwhelms.

Poor girl – I should never have tormented her so. But…show me a merciful child and I will truly avow a belief in miracles, and I'll throw in my back-pay besides. It was her over-sensitivity that done her in. Still, what's life without a few thousand regrets?

She felt his eyes exploring her like ghost hands.

The girl spoke, a tone of command that rang like iron on stone.

The Fenn had fallen far from their past glories, yet they remembered enough to know their old name. You cannot even make that claim. Your kind walked this Earth when the T'lan Imass were still flesh. From your blood came the Barghast and the Trell. You are Thelomen Toblakai.

Like all men - you hate to say you don't know and leave it at that. You have an answer to every question, and if you don't you make one up." "An outrageous accusation, my dear. It is not a matter of making up answers, it is rather an exercise in conjecture. There is a difference—" "That's what you say, not what I have to listen to. All the time. Endless words. Does a man even exist who believes there can be too many words?" "I don't know.

Everything breaks." "Aye, lad. Everything breaks." "You could do it." "Do what?" "Break that sword." "No. I can't." "Everything breaks!" "Including people, lad.

Or maybe just confused. All those bickering worshippers, each one convinced their version is the right one. Imagine getting prayers from ten million believers, not one of them believing the same thing as the one kneeling beside him or her. Imagine all those Holy Books, not one of them agreeing on anything, yet all of them purporting to be the word of that one god. Imagine two armies annihilating each other, both in that god's name. Who wouldn't be driven mad by all that?

Apocalypse is rarely sudden; no, among these mortals, it creeps slow, yet inevitable, relentless in its thorough obliteration of life, of health, of beauty.

I do not want to meet my evil self,' said Pearl. Draconus glanced across at him. 'Who does?

The beast was a nightmare, close to nine feet tall, crouching on two thin hind limbs. A lone foreleg, long and multijointed, jutted down from its strangely bifurcated chest. From a hunched, angular shoulder blade, the demon's sinuous neck rose to a flat, elongated head.

Hadrian slapped him on the back. "I'm liking you more and more, Buck. A claustrophobic engineer who's entirely devoid of curiosity trapped aboard a spaceship in the midst of eternal darkness

Kinship is more important than you might think. Blood-bound lives are the web that carries each of us; they make up that which a life climbs, from newborn to child, then child to adulthood. Without such life-forces, one withers and dies.