Top 500 Steven Erikson Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Kulp saw something crumbling into ruins behind the lad’s light-blue eyes.”

— Steven Erikson

452. “And so, yet again, we crush the blossom in our hand, lift our gaze from the tumbling petals, and ask the world, ‘Where, then, is this beauty you promised?”

— Steven Erikson

453. “If indeed the universe posessed a mind, it was a cluttered one. And if corners such as these thrived in that mind, then the custodian was asleep, or, perhaps, drunk.”

— Steven Erikson

454. “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

455. “The door flew open, carrying into the room a gust of steamy air and then Trotts.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

458. “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

459. “If holy words could not offer up an answer to despair, then what good were they? If the truths so revealed did not invite restitution, then their utterance was no more than a curse. And if the restitution is found not in the mortal realm, then we are invited to inaction, and indifference. Will you promise to a soul a reward buried in supposition? Are we to reach throughout our lives but never touch? Are we to dream and to hope, but never know?”

— Steven Erikson

460. “But the value was an illusion. Hate was a lie that in feeding fills the hater with the feeling of satiation, even as his spirit starves.”

— Steven Erikson

461. “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

462. “He’d forgotten how irritating company could be. Uninvited, unwelcome, persistent reminder of his own weaknesses. And.”

— Steven Erikson

463. “Closing in a noose around her neck, the sound blocked the outside world – its air, its light.”

— Steven Erikson

464. “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

465. “Paran could feel nothing but the white fire of vengeance, filling his mind, coruscating through his body.”

— Steven Erikson

466. “An unwillingness. I can carry no one else’s burden – not even for a moment. We are all pulled inside ourselves now, each alone...”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

468. “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

469. “It must be taken as given that a man who happens to be the world’s most powerful, most terrible, most deadly sorceror, must have a woman at his side. But it does not follow, my children, that a woman of similar proportions requires a man at hers.”

— Steven Erikson

470. “He strode down the empty street, cleaving the low-lying mists that swirled like incandescent cloaks in the gaslight.”

— Steven Erikson

471. “The detonation was deafening, the blast a bruised gout of flame that drove back the airborne sand and the wind carrying it, and flung the attackers and their mounts like a god’s hand, backward onto the road and off the sides.”

— Steven Erikson

472. “And at that instant, Ivis, so brightly painted in triumph, does the world freeze? Does time itself cease, nothing crawling on; not a single moment following in its usual tumble? But what world offers this impossibility? Only the one begat in a mind, and then raised in chains, never to be set free. The fashioning of nostalgia, my friend, imprisons us.”

— Steven Erikson

473. “If there was neither a time before nor a time after, then was not the moment of creation eternal and yet for ever instantaneous?”

— Steven Erikson

474. “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

475. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

477. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

479. “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

480. “Was not love its own shock? A match to that of death? Did it not take the eyes first? Such reverberations as to weaken the bravest man or woman – its trembling echoes never left a mortal soul.”

— Steven Erikson

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

487. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

491. “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

492. “The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

494. “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

495. “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

496. “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

497. “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

498. “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

499. “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

500. “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