Quotes from Steven Erikson

Laws decide wich forms of oppression are allowed, Lord. And because of that, those laws are servants to those in power, for whom oppression is given as a right over those who have little or no power.

The existance of many gods conveys true complexity of mortal life. Conversely, the assertion of but one god leads to a denial of complexity, and encourages the need to maek the world simple. Not the fault of the god, but a crime commited by its believers.

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

My anthropological back gets raised hackles with simple worlds and simple conflicts. Nothing's simple. Nothing ever was.

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.

All that we were has led us to where we are, but tells us little of where we're going. Memories are a weight you can never shrug off.

If you can only feel safe when everybody else feels, thinks and looks the same as you, then you're a Hood-damned coward…not to mention a vicious tyrant in the making.

We do naught but scratch the world, frail and fraught. Every vast drama of civilizations, of peoples with their certainties and gestures, means nothing, affects nothing. Life crawls on, ever on.

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.

It' s easy to weep when staying far away, doing nothing.

Braven Tooth, you remember the last time I played-' 'That was the last time?' 'It was, and there's been a lot who've fallen since then. Friends. People we grew to love, and now miss, like holes in the heart.' He drew a deep breath, then continued, 'It's been waiting, inside, for a long time. So, my old, old friends, let's hear some names.

Some roads, once set out upon, reveal no possible path but forward. Every other track is blocked by snarls of thorns, steaming fissures or rearing walls of stone. What waits at the far end of the forward path is unknown, and since knowledge itself may prove a curse, the best course is simply to place one foot in front of the other, and think not at all of fate or the cruel currents of destiny.

Those who knew but one path would come to worship it, even as it led to a cliff's edge.

Land, domination, pre-emptive attacks - all just excuses, mundane justifications that do nothing but disguise the simple distinction. They are not us. We are not them.

And in the city on all sides, the howling of the Hounds rose in an ear-shattering, soul-flailing crescendo. The Lord of Death had arrived, to walk the streets in the City of Blue Fire.

The past is all patterns, and those patterns remain beneath our feet, even as the stars above reveal their own patterns—for the stars we gaze upon each night are naught but an illusion from the past.

The dust dreams of the world it had once been. But the dust, alas, does not command the wind.

If we are to live ... 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.

witness two scenes. In one, an angry, bitter man beats another man to death in an alley in the Gadrobi District. In the other, a man of vast wealth conspires with equally wealthy compatriots to raise yet again the price of grain, making the cost of simple bread so prohibitive that families starve, are led into lives of crime, and die young. Are both acts of violence?

So you say, with your shiny hair and pouty lips - and those breasts - just wait till you start dropping whelps, they'll be at your ankles one day, big as they are - not the whelps, the breasts. The whelps will be in your hair - no, not the shiny hair on your head, well, yes, that hair, but only as a manner of speech.

The gentler and kinder the god, the more harsh and cruel its worshippers, for they hold to their conviction with taut certainty, febrile in its extremity, and so cannot abide dissenters. They will kill, they will torture, in that god's name. And see in themselves no conflict, no matter how bloodstained their hands.

Pogroms need no reason, sir, none that can weather challenge, in any case. Difference in kind is the first recognition, the only one needed, in fact. Land, domination, pre-emptive attacks—all just excuses, mundane justifications that do nothing but disguise the simple distinction. They are not us. We are not them.

But Hood was not yet done with her. He swung her up again, spun and once more hammered her onto the stone. 'I have had,' the Jaghut roared, and into the air she went again, and down once more, 'enough' - with a sob the crushed, broken body was yanked from the ground again - 'of- 'your- justice!

He argued that every certainty is an empty throne. That those who knew but one path would come to worship it, even as it led to a cliff's edge. He argued, and in the silence of that ghost's indifference to his words he came to realize that he himself spoke – fierce with heat – from the foot of an empty throne.