Quotes from Steven Erikson

There is no such place, Destriant. Even in isolation we were assailed – by our own doubts, by all the flavours of grief and despair. You and the Mortal Sword and the Shield Anvil, you have led us back into the living world – we have come from a place of death, but now we shall take our place among the peoples of this world. It is right that we do so.

How he knew no one could say. How he thought, no one could imagine. How deep and vast his love, no one could conceive.

Sex is the glue that holds society together.

Us soldiers only got one kind of coin worth anything, and it's called respect. And we hoard it, we hide it away, and there ain't nobody who'd call us generous. Easy spenders we're not. But there's something feels even worse than having to give up a coin – it's when somebody steps up and tosses one back at us.

T]he real meaning of 'tradition' was ... 'stupidity on purpose.

It's what being a soldier is all about. That is what I have seen since we found them. You do not choose your family, and sometimes there's trouble in that family, but you don't choose.' 'But they did. They chose to be soldiers.' 'And then they come face to face with death, Saddic. That is the blood tie, and it makes a knot not even dying can cut.

The glory of endemic existential angst invites in one the conviction that nothing good will come of anything, so there is no way you can actually disappoint me since I'm already disappointed down to the very core of my being.

Beware the drunkard's wisdom.

Karos has said again and again, justice is a conceit. It does not exist in nature. 'Retribution seen in natural catastrophes is manufactured by all too eager and all too pious people, each one convinced the world will end but spare them and them alone. But we all know, the world is inherited by the obnoxious, not the righteous.' Unless, came the thought in Janath's voice, the two are one and the same.

The named soldier – dead, melted wax – demands a response among the living . . . a response no-one can make. 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?

There is nothing more dangerous than a man without a sense of humour.

Famosity? There must be such a word. I used it!

Uhm, in our universe human civilization has descended into a pseudo-fascist hate-mongering anti-intellectual humorless inflexible lowest-common-denominator corporate fuck-everyone-over paradigm of systemic inequality and suffering and misery except for the chosen few.

Show me a mortal who is not pursued, and I'll show you a corpse. Every hunter is hunted, every mind that knows itself has stalkers. We drive and are driven. The unknown pursues the ignorant, the truth assails every scholar wise enough to know his own ignorance, for that is the meaning of unknowable truths.

Life stays stubborn until it has no choice but to give up, and even then it's likely to spit one last time in the eye of whatever's killed it. We're cruel in victory and cruel in defeat, my friends.

They cannot see their own impending demise. It is always the way of things, such blindness. No matter how long and perfect the succession of fallen empires and civilizations so clearly writ into the past, the belief remains that one's own shall live for ever, and is not subject to the indomitable rules of dissolution that bind all of nature.

He was a man who would never ask for sympathy. He was a man who sought only to do what was right. Such people appear in the world, every world, now and then, like a single refrain of some blessed song, a fragment caught on the spur of an otherwise raging cacophony.

When you been dead, everything after that's looking up.

The prince is blind to subtlety. He knows his own ignorance and stupidity so is ever suspicious of others, especially when they say things he does not understand. One cannot negotiate when dragged in the wake of emotions.

To remember rape is to fold details into sensation, and so relive each time its terrible truth. He told you this could become habit, an addiction, until even despair became a welcome taste on your tongue. Understand, then - as only you can here - that to take one's own life is the final expression of despair. You saw that. Buruk the Pale. You felt that, at the sea's edge.

There were other things than love upon which to thrive." (MT, p140)

Comicons and Science Fiction conventions are always fun. Besides, the days of the secluded writer are long gone. What's ironic is that the modern age has forced the most introverted, shy, and anxious segment of the population into the limelight. Adapt or disappear, and for most of us, conventions are a safe place in which we can learn how to be public figures. And then there's the blowhards? Did I mention the blowhards?

And the good know only one truth. But it's a lie, because there's always more than one truth.

Oh, we take you into slaughter without a moment's thought. And yes, some of you come to enjoy it, to lust for that cacophony, that violence, the reek of blood. And so we share with you, dear horse, our peculiar madness. But who judges us for this crime against you and your kind? No one. Unless you horses have a god.