Steven Erikson Quotes - Page 3

Name none of the fallen, for they stand in our place, and stand there still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown. Let it not be said that I was one among the dead to accuse the living.

I love you still, but with your death I succumbed to a kind of infatuation. I convinced myself that what you and I had, so very briefly, was of far vaster and deeper import than it truly was. Of all the weapons we chose to turn upon ourselves, guilt is the sharpest, Silverfox. It can carve one's own past into unrecognizable shapes, false memories leading to beliefs that sow all kinds of obsessions.

What makes a Malazan soldier so dangerous? They’re allowed to think.

I mean the only thing us dead soldiers got in common is that none of us was good enough or lucky enough to survive the fight. We're a host of failures.

And over it all, the butterflies swarmed, like a million yellow-pettalled flowers dancing on swirling winds.

Desires should never be justified,' Tehol said, wagging a finger. 'All you end up doing is illuminating the hidden reasons by virtue of their obvious absence.

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. Imagine a world without such souls. Yes, it should have been harder to do.

Shadow is ever besieged, for that is its nature. Whilst darkness devours, and light steals. And so one sees shadow ever retreat to hidden places, only to return in the wake of the war between dark and light.

The art of illusion is grace itself.

The only consistent narrative we possess is one that we share with every other life-form: we are born, we live, and then we die.

None could guess my confusion, my host of deluded illusions and elusive delusions! A mantle of marble hiding a crumbling core of sandstone. See how they stare at me, wondering, all wondering, at my secret wellspring of wisdom...' Let's kill him,' Crokus muttered, 'if only to put him out of our misery.

I have to feel what I'm writing, right down to the core.

The notion of evil for its own sake strikes me as boring -- all these Dark Lords intent on creating wastelands packed with enslaved victims... for what?

We are all lone souls. It pays to know humility, lest the delusion of control, of mastery, overwhelms. And, indeed, we seem a species prone to that delusion, again and ever again." ~Fiddler, pg. 558

Do mortal fools still measure the increments leading to their deaths, wagering pleasures against costs, persisting in the delusion that deeds have value, that the world and all the gods sit in judgment over every decision made or not made?

Shake your fist all you want but dead is dead

Soldiers are issued armour for their flesh and bones, but they must fashion their own for their souls. Piece by piece.

A story invites both writer and reader into a kind of superficial ease: we want to slide along, pleasingly entertained, lost in the fictional dream.

The harder the world, the fiercer the honour.

Ben Adaephon Delat," Pearl said plaintively, "see the last who comes. You send me to my death." "I know," Quick Ben whispered. "Flee, then. I will hold them enough to ensure your escape no more." Quick Ben sank down past the roof. Before he passed from sight Pearl spoke again. "Ben Adaephon Delat, do you pity me?" "Yes" he replied softly, then pivoted and dropped down into darkness.

I warn you all, hatred is finding fertile soil within me. And in your compassion, in your every good intention, you nurture it.

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.

He was not a modest man. Contemplating suicide, he summoned a dragon.' Gothos' Folly

A civilization can easily drown in what it knows as in what doesn't know. Consider,' he continued, Gotho's Folly. Gotho's curse was in being too aware - of everything. Every permutation, every potential. Enough to poison every scan he cast on the world. It availed him naught, and worse, he was aware of even that.

Believe it or not, friendships are difficult to write in fiction. They can easily come across as forced, particularly if they involve too much explication and too many overt gestures of affection.