Top 500 Steven Erikson Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “The game the mind must play to unleash destruction. He’d stood amidst the ranks more than once, sensing the soldiers alongside him seeking and finding that place in the mind, cold and silent, the place where husbands, fathers, wives and mothers became killers. And practice made it easier, each time. Until it becomes a place you never leave.”

— Steven Erikson

452. “Rely not upon conscience,’ Feren said, hearing the bitterness in her own voice and not caring. ‘It ever kneels to necessity.”

— Steven Erikson

453. “Laughing, he’d flung dense clouds of earth and stone skyward to blind them.”

— Steven Erikson

454. “They are human, after all, and it is human nature to transform loss into a virtue. So that it might be lived with, so that it might be justified.”

— Steven Erikson

455. “The blade slid through the energy. Unaffected, the power swept over, then into Paran. Blinded, he screamed as bitter cold lanced through him, shattering his thoughts, his sense of self. An invisible hand closed around his soul. Mine! The word rang in his head, triumphant and filled with savage glee. You are mine!”

— Steven Erikson

456. “In my village no one is a stranger – and this is what civilization has turned it’s back on. One day, Munug, I will make a world of villages, adn the age of cities will be over. And slavery will be dead, and there shall be no chains – tell your god. Tonight, I am his knight.′ – Karsa Orlong.”

— Steven Erikson

457. “My inability to find peace, to trust it when I do find it, and to hold on to it.”

— Steven Erikson

458. “A small whimper escaped her throat, then she desperately pulled her eyes away.”

— Steven Erikson

459. “Serious people never stopped waging their war on joy and pleasure, and they were both relentless and tireless.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

461. “Cutter rubbed at his face. He needed a shave. And a bath. And clean, new clothes. And a purpose in life.”

— Steven Erikson

462. “Armour encumbers, restricts the body and soul within it. But it also protects. Blows are blunted Feelings lose their edge, leaving us to suffer naught but a plague of bruises, and after a time, bruises fade.”

— Steven Erikson

463. “The midday heat sapped her strength, and the sluggishness reached through to her thoughts.”

— Steven Erikson

464. “Importance lies solely in the deeds done, the goals achieved. Time is preparation, nothing more. One prepares for as long as is required. To do this is to accept that planning begins at birth. You are born and before all else you are plunged into shadow, wrapped inside the holy ambivalence, there to suckle sweet sustenance.”

— Steven Erikson

465. “And we’re not talking mild snoring, either. Imagine being chained to the floor of a cave, with the tide crashing in, louder, louder, louder –.”

— Steven Erikson

466. “Mammot’s body withered beneath the clambering, frenzied attack. Flesh was ripped away, fires lancing, boring holes through him. He was driven to his knees, a vortex swirling like madness around him.”

— Steven Erikson

467. “Words are the weapons used by those who see others with contempt. A contempt which only deepens when they see how those others are deceived and made into fools because they chose to believe. Because in their naivety they thought the meaning of a word was fixed, immune to abuse.”

— Steven Erikson

468. “Never make a roadblock of yourself on trouble’s road. No, make yourself a bridge instead, with stones slick as grease.”

— Steven Erikson

469. “But even that word, ‘stranger’, arose from a time of kin-hearths and a half-dozen huts marking the very limits of a people, a realm, a temporary nest in the seasonal rounds – when we lived in nature and nature lived in us and no other divide existed beyond what was known and what was unknown.”

— Steven Erikson

470. “The panic that had filled him was subsiding, perhaps having burned itself out.”

— Steven Erikson

471. “What holds me to life, if not desire? What vaster power exists? With it, I swear, I feel I can defy the inevitable. Weapon and shield, companion and ally, enough to make the world back away, enough to surmount the highest walls and cross the deepest chasms. Desire, you stand in place of a lover’s arms, and make your embrace such dark comfort. She.”

— Steven Erikson

472. “Cultures can die, Hull, but the people live on, and what they carry within them are the seeds of rebirth –.”

— Steven Erikson

473. “In natural justice, Arathan, the weak cannot hide, unless we grant them the privilege. And understand, it is ever a privilege, for which the weak should be eternally grateful.”

— Steven Erikson

474. “He’d seen enough of life to know he wouldn’t miss it much. His only regret was the grief his death would level upon those who cared for him. Venes.”

— Steven Erikson

475. “None the less, you have my leave, if only that you might ensure your spies are made aware of precisely when her spies make their report, so that they in turn may report to you and you may then report to me. Although what I am to do with such knowledge will no doubt escape me, given that the event initiating these flurries of reporting is none other than the one occurring right now in this room.”

— Steven Erikson

476. “Never bargain with a man who has nothing to lose.”

— Steven Erikson

477. “The longer one lives, the less valued is that life. Why is that?”

— Steven Erikson

478. “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.”

— Steven Erikson

479. “Every artist was haunted by lies. Every artist fought to find truths. Every artist failed. Some turned back, embracing those comforting lies. Others took their own lives in despair. Still others drank themselves into the barrow, or poisoned everyone who drew near enough to touch, to wound. Some simply gave up, and wasted away in obscurity. A few discovered their own mediocrity, and this was the cruellest discovery of all. None found their way to the truths.”

— Steven Erikson

480. “That’s the thing with Just Wars – they never end and never will because Justice is a weak god with too many names.”

— Steven Erikson

481. “Logic is simply the language of convenient rationalization in a pseudo-science-loving civilization.”

— Steven Erikson

482. “Bodily functions are a wonderful, indeed sensual, thing. Why, the mere blowing clear of a nose is a potential source of ecstasy, once you grasp its phlegmatic allure.”

— Steven Erikson

483. “It is not enough to wish for a better world for the children. It is not enough to shield them with ease and comfort. Lostara Yil, if we do not sacrifice our own ease, our own comfort, to make the future’s world a better one, then we curse our own children. We leave them a misery they do not deserve; we leave them a host of lessons unearned.”

— Steven Erikson

484. “Shall I loose the fleas on my head to rend your worthless flesh from your jellied bones?”

— Steven Erikson

485. “The notion of freedom could make even peace and order seem oppressive, generate the suspicion of some hidden purpose, some vast deceit, some unspecified crime being perpetrated beyond human ken. That was a generous way of looking at it; the alternative was to acknowledge that humans were intrinsically conflicted, cursed with acquisitive addictions of the spirit.”

— Steven Erikson

486. “When robbed, the rich cry out for protection and prosecution. When stealing, they expect the judiciary to look the other way.”

— Steven Erikson

487. “Lying with lovers also belonged to night, and that made sense, for it was in the midst of true darkness that the first fire of life was born, flickering awake to drive back the unchanging absence of light. To lie with a lover was to celebrate the creation of fire. From this in the flesh to the world beyond.”

— Steven Erikson

488. “She held herself straight, moving slowly, making her way towards the head of the column. And of all the journeys she had undertaken, since the very beginning, this one – from the back of the column to its head – was the longest one she had ever travelled. And, as ever, she travelled it alone.”

— Steven Erikson

489. “She saw her breath curl in a white stream, drawn inward to the darkness beyond.”

— Steven Erikson

490. “Some roads were easier to leave than others. Many walked to seek the future, but found only the past. Others sought the past, to make it new once more, and discovered that the past was nothing like the one they’d imagined.”

— Steven Erikson

491. “The thief dragged his attention from the wooden block. ‘I’m listening.”

— Steven Erikson

492. “Oh, Laseen,” she murmured, tears welling in her eyes, “I know why we fear this Jaghut Tyrant. Because he became human, he became like us, he enslaved, he destroyed, and he did it better than we could.” She lowered her head into her hands. “That’s why we fear.”

— Steven Erikson

493. “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.”

— Steven Erikson

494. “I have tolerated the deceitful and the malicious for long enough. My sword shall now answer them.”

— Steven Erikson

495. “There are no singular tales. A life in solitude is a life rushing to death. But a blind man will never rush; he but feels his way, as befits an uncertain world.”

— Steven Erikson

496. “It’s just the place we chose. To do what’s right. But then, maybe that alone gives reason to take us down, to destroy us.”

— Steven Erikson

497. “The pot-thrower in the hut behind the shop, hands and forearms slick with clay, dreaming, yes, of the years in which a life took shape, when each press of a fingertip sent a deep track across a once smooth surface, changing the future, reshaping the past, and was this not as much chance as design? For all that intent could score a path, that the ripples sent up and down and outward could be surmised by decades of experience, was the outcome ever truly predictable?”

— Steven Erikson

498. “Eventually every man reaches a point where every memory is unwelcome.”

— Steven Erikson

499. “Dour music has its own beauty, for the song of ruin is most fertile.”

— Steven Erikson

500. “Do you like shiny things? I do, even though they hurt my eyes. Maybe it’s because they hurt my eyes. What do you think?’ ‘I don’t think much of anything any more, lad.’ ‘I think you do too much.’ ‘Oh, really?’ ‘Father thinks the same. You think about things there’s no point in thinking about. It makes no difference. But I know why you do.’ ‘You do?’ The lad nodded. ‘The same reason I like shiny things.”

— Steven Erikson