Top 500 Steven Erikson Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “To love in absence is to float on ever still waters. No sudden currents, no treacherous tides, no possibility of drowning.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

453. “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

454. “The girl stopped to regard him, her small round face slowly coming to mirror Paran’s own frown.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

456. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

458. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

460. “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

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. “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

463. “While the innocent yearned to lose their innocence, those who had already done so in turn envied the innocent, and knew grief in what they had lost. Between the two, no exchange of truths was possible.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

466. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

468. “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

469. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

472. “Is the universe holographic? Probably. Get microscopic enough and you start seeing pixels. I don’t know about you, but that makes me laugh. Until I think about how easy it is to hack a program. Any program.”

— Steven Erikson

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

480. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

482. “The rush of the river was a voice, a presence. Water flowed indifferent to the heave and plunge of the sun, the shrouded moon and the slow spin of the stars. The sound reached them in a song without words, and all effort to grasp its meaning was hopeless, for, like the water itself, one could not grasp hold of sound. The flow was ceaseless and immeasurable and just as stillness did not in fact exist, so neither did true, absolute silence.”

— Steven Erikson

483. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

485. “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

486. “None to witness. Dust of dreams, dust of all that we never achieved. Dust of what we might have been and what we cannot help but be.”

— Steven Erikson

487. “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

488. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

491. “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

492. “We are not all. We are defined within a greater definition, and this greater definition eludes comprehension, because we are lacking. Incapable. Insufficient.”

— Steven Erikson

493. “It was as if a giant invisible hand had reached down to the Crown, closing to gather in every building, crushing them all while pushing down into the hill.”

— Steven Erikson

494. “The curse of great minds. Arriving young to an idea, surviving the siege that invariably assails it, then, finally, standing guard on the ramparts long after the war’s over, weapons dull in leaden hands.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

496. “But history teaches us nothing new. And should I choose to look ahead, to what is yet to come, why, I see a future made most toxic, born on the day society sets the value of wealth above that of lives.”

— Steven Erikson

497. “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

498. “All those bickering worshippers, each one convinced their version is the right one. Imagine getting prayers from ten million believers, not one of them believing the same thing as the one kneeling beside him or her. Imagine all those Holy Books, not one of them agreeing on anything, yet all of them purporting to be the word of that one god. Imagine two armies annihilating each other, both in that god’s name. Who wouldn’t be driven mad by that?”

— Steven Erikson

499. “There are ways of leaving. The worst of these is also the most final.”

— Steven Erikson

500. “How many great compassions arose from a dark source? A private place of secret failings?”

— Steven Erikson