Quotes by Steven Erikson

He rubbed at his face, as if seeking to awaken the right words from muscle, blood and bone.

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.

There is plenty of dignity in just holding on

There are times, Kruppe murmurs, when celibacy born of sad deprivation becomes a boon, nay, a source of great relief.

If all we seek is an escape, what does that say about the world we live in. We are desperate with our dreams. What - oh, what - does that say?

Silence!” Korbolo snapped. He eyed Duiker. “You are the historian who rode with Coltaine.”The historian faced him. “I am.”“You are a soldier.”“As you say.”“I do, and so you shall die with these soldiers, in a manner no different-““You mean to slaughter ten thousand unarmed men and women, Korbolo Dom?”“I mean to cripple Tavore before she even sets foot on this continent. I mean to make her too furious to think. I mean to crack that façade so she dreams of vengeance day and night, poisoning her every decision.”“You always fashioned yourself as the Empire’s harshest Fist, didn’t you, Korbolo Dom? As if cruelty’s a virtue…

One day, perhaps, you will see for yourself that regrets are as nothing. The value lies in how they are answered.

All art is an intensely vulnerable gesture, and it is made with no small amounts of risk, and fear. So, I have plenty of sympathy for self-defense mechanisms, especially among artists.

“Power is violence, its promise, its deed. Power cares nothing for reason, nothing for justice, nothing for compassion. It is, in fact, the singular abnegation of these things – once the cloak of deceits is stripped away, this one truth is revealed.”

“Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortals shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched before one now stretched before him.”

“The stars, they are as the sun. Each star. Every star. And those spheres- they are worlds, realms, each one different yet the same.”

“And so we weep for the fallen. We weep for those yet to fall, and in war the screams are loud and harsh and in peace the wail is so drawn-out we tell ourselves we hear nothing.”

“It wouldn’t be happiness then, happiness wasn’t kind anyway, the way it could vanish in an instant. He might not miss it at all.”