Quotes from Steven Erikson

She drew him round and settled against him, murmered 'If there is to be a conversation, keep it short, please. What I desire is not answered by words.' Korlat to Whiskeyjack

The ground is bare and hard / and will hold all secrets / and the sky cares not / for the games of those beneath it.

Leaves skirled past, clattering like tiny bones.

Change was rarely chosen, and its common arrival was slow, subtle.

Coll swung a glare on Kruppe. 'What outrageous lies have you uttered now?' The round man looked offended. 'Kruppe and the truth are lifelong partners, friend Coll! Indeed, wedded bliss – we only yesterday celebrated our fortieth anniversary, the mistress of veracity and I.

he'd stayed, nailed to a single tree but only because he'd grown used to the scenery around it. It was amazing what could be endured when in the grip of inertia. He had reached a point where anything strange, unfamiliar, was cause for fear. But unlike his brothers and sisters, Mappo could not ride that fear across the full span of his life. For all that, it had taken the horror he now approached to prise him from the tree.

He was not too old, and he had a family—people to fight for, to return to, people that mattered in his life. Those were important things. A necessary pressure, fire for the blood. None of which existed in Gamet's life.

It's a fact that men don't need words, but women do. We have penises, after all. Who needs words when you have a penis? Whereas with women there are two breasts, which invites conversation, just as a good behind presents perfect punctuation, something every man knows . What's wrong with the world? You ask a man and he says, 'Don't ask.' Ask a woman and you'll be dead of old age before she's finished. Hah. Hah ha.

And Karsa Orlong did not press, revealing his clear understanding that a soul could bleed from unseen places and often all that kept a mortal going depended on avoiding such places.

Twenty thousand? Fifty? Five? Scholars make a career of not agreeing on anything.

Do you wander and wonder? Do you start at your own shadow, or awaken to rattling disbelief that this is all you are, prospects bleak, bereft of the proof of your ambition?

The alchemist pulled his gaze back to Vorcan

It's bad when you lose 'em. Friends, I mean. Makes you wonder why you're still here, why the damned sack of blood and muscle and bones keeps on going. So you run. Then what? Nothing. You're not here, but wherever you are, you're still there.

Age did such things, feeding the desire then starving the will.

Awful things, children. Needy, self-centered tyrants, the boys all teeth and firsts, the girls all claws and spit. Gathering into sniveling packs and sniffing out vulnerabilities — and woe to the child not cunning enough to hide their own — the others would close in like the grubby shark they were. Great pastime, savaging someone.

Whatever we do as adults, we make in our children more of what we are. Is there no end to this? Scholars speak of progress, but I fear now that they are mistaken. This is not progress that we see, it is elaboration. Nothing of the old ways ever goes away, it just hides beneath modernity's confusion.

One who binds risks getting bound in return. I will not walk that path.

Intelligence was incomplete—perhaps it always would be—it was flawed. It could not distinguish its own lies from its own truths. Upon the scale of the self, they often weighed the same. Mistakes and malice were arguments of intent alone, not effect.

the boy walks another soldier, another one bright heart not yet cooled to hard iron

Fiddler turned in his seat and met his corporal's dark eyes. Trouble? Maybe. The exchange was silent, a product of years fighting side by side. Crokus

Never apologize when you're right, Keneb.

But what mattered beyond just that? This single moment, pitching headlong into the next one, over and over again, as firm and true as each step he took

And, hovering inches from her throat, was the tip of the warrior's flint sword.

We distort with deliberate purpose; we confine vast meaning into the strictures of imagined necessity. In this lies both failing and gift, for in the surrender of truth we fashion, rightly or wrongly, universal significance. Specific gives way to general; detail gives way to grandiose form, and in the telling we are exalted beyond our mundane selves.