Top 500 Steven Erikson Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 10

51. “If we are to live,′ Rake went on, ’we must take risks. Else our lives become deaths in all but name. There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail – should we fall – we will know that we have lived.”

— Steven Erikson

52. “Shake your fist all you want but dead is dead.”

— Steven Erikson

53. “We are all interludes in history, a drawn breath to make pause in the rush, and when we are gone, those breaths join the chorus of the wind. But who listens to the wind?”

— Steven Erikson

54. “A celebration of insignificance, Is that all we are in the end? And one day I’ll just be one more of those faces, frozen in death and wonder.”

— Steven Erikson

55. “Kallor said: ‘I walked this land when the T’lan Imass were but children. I have commanded armies a hundred thousand strong. I have spread the fire of my wrath across entire continents, and sat alone upon tall thrones. Do you grasp the meaning of this?’ ‘Yes,’ said Caladan Brood, ’you never learn.”

— Steven Erikson

56. “We humans do not understand compassion. In each moment of our lives, we betray it. Aye, we know of its worth, yet in knowing we then attach to it a value, we guard the giving of it, believing it must be earned. T’lan Imass. Compassion is priceless.”

— Steven Erikson

57. “You must dismantle your sources, lest you do nothing but ape the prejudices of others.”

— Steven Erikson

58. “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?”

— Steven Erikson

59. “Nostalgia was like a disease, one that crept in and stole the colour from the world and the time you lived in. Made for bitter people. Dangerous people, when they wanted back what never was.”

— Steven Erikson

60. “You weep for this, Trull Sengar, because your love has not been answered, and there is no greater anguish than that.”

— Steven Erikson

61. “Detachment is a flaw, not a virtue-don’t you realize that?”

— Steven Erikson

62. “What matter the colour of the collar around a man’s neck, if the chains linked to them were identical?”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

64. “Your brain works with all the subtlety of a malicious child.”

— Steven Erikson

65. “We are all worthwhile, sir, once we assume the burden of forgiveness and the effort of absolution.”

— Steven Erikson

66. “The beast that was civilization ever faced forward, and in making its present world it devoured the world to come. It was an appalling truth that one’s own children could be so callously sacrificed to immediate comforts, yet this was so and it had always been so.”

— Steven Erikson

67. “People in great need were quick to find blame in themselves, quick to assume the burden of guilt for things they in truth had no control over and could not hope to change.”

— Steven Erikson

68. “Never, dear gods. Never mess with mortals.”

— Steven Erikson

69. “As if true honesty belonged to solitude, since to be witnessed was to perform, and performance was inherently false since it invited expectation.”

— Steven Erikson

70. “I was needed, but I myself did not need. I had followers, but not allies, and only now do I understand the difference. And it is vast.”

— Steven Erikson

71. “The dead are ever refashioned, for they have no defence against those who would use or abuse them – who they were, what their deeds meant.”

— Steven Erikson

72. “False visions of the world were a child’s right, not something to be resented, but neither were they worthy of any adult sense of longing.”

— Steven Erikson

73. “Expectation is the hoary curse of humanity.”

— Steven Erikson

74. “The world was full of lies. And people keep telling us we need them, all in the name of peace. But the peace we got was poison.”

— Steven Erikson

75. “I am done with this world, for I am alone in it. Alone.”

— Steven Erikson

76. “An unfortunate side effect of education among the masses is lack of respect.”

— Steven Erikson

77. “This is Quick Ben’s game, O Elder. The bones are in his sweaty hands and they have been for some time. Now, if at his table you’ll find the Worm of Autumn, and the once Lord of Death, and Shadowthrone and Cotillion, not to mention the past players Anomander Rake and Dessembrae, and who knows who else, well – did you really believe a few thousand damned Nah’ruk could take him down? The thing about Adaephon Delat’s game is this: he cheats.”

— Steven Erikson

78. “I took the stone bowl in both hands and poured out my time onto the ground drowning hapless insects feeding the weeds until the sun stood looking down and stole the stain. Seeing in the vessel’s cup a thousand cracks a thousand cracks I looked back the way I came and saw a trail green with memories lost whoever made this bowl was a fool but the greater he who carried it. Stone.”

— Steven Erikson

79. “Some were destined to walk alone through life, others not.”

— Steven Erikson

80. “If we are to live, we must take risks. Else our lives become deaths in all but name.”

— Steven Erikson

81. “Too many regrets. Lost chances – and with each one passing the less human we all became, and the deeper into the nightmare of power we all sank.”

— Steven Erikson

82. “Death and dying makes us into children once again, in truth, one last time, there in our final wailing cries. More than one philosopher has claimed that we ever remain children, far beneath the indurated layers that make up the armour of adulthood. 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

83. “It was compassion. The tragic kind of compassion, the kind that sacrifices itself and sees that sacrifice as the only choice and thus no choice at all, one that must be accepted without hesitation.”

— Steven Erikson

84. “Beneficial indeed,” Kruppe said, gratefully accepting the earthenware mug. “Kruppe has learned the value of modern language. Such long-lipped dribbles common to those ancient scholars are a curse Kruppe is thankful to find extinct in our time.”

— Steven Erikson

85. “We lie about our past to make peace with the present. If we accepted the truth of our history, we would find no peace – our consciences would not permit it. Nor would our rage.”

— Steven Erikson

86. “Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.”

— Steven Erikson

87. “Convergence,” Tool said. “Power ever draws other power.”

— Steven Erikson

88. “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.”

— Steven Erikson

89. “Isolation hones the inner voice, the unspoken dialogue between the selves – and surely there are many selves within each of us. Some uglier than others.’ There.”

— Steven Erikson

90. “And among those that came from the vaulted heavens of silver, the Tiste Andii, dwellers of Darkness in the Place before Light, Black Dragons numbering five, and in their league sailed red-winged Silanah, said to dwell among the Tiste Andii in their Fang of Darkness descending from the vaulted heavens of silver.”

— Steven Erikson

91. “Consider this a warning. Liars will lie, and continue to do so, even beyond being caught out. They will lie, and in time, such liars will convince themselves, will in all self-righteousness divest the liars of culpability.”

— Steven Erikson

92. “Speak truth, grow still, until the water is clear between us.”

— Steven Erikson

93. “No purer artist exists or has ever existed than a child freed to imagine.”

— Steven Erikson

94. “Of all the weapons we 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.”

— Steven Erikson

95. “All too often cowardice wears the habit of wounded pride.”

— Steven Erikson

96. “This is what was, once. Terrible armies of T’lan Imass. We hunted down the Jaghut. We gave them what I see here. By all the spirits, is this our only voice?”

— Steven Erikson

97. “Conviction is a fist of stone at the heart of all things. Its form is shaped by sure hands, the detritus quickly swept from view. It is built to withstand, built to defy challenge, and when cornered it fights without honour. There is nothing more terrible than conviction.”

— Steven Erikson

98. “Purest light will blind as surely as absolute darkness.”

— Steven Erikson

99. “Certainty was an illusion, a lie. Fanaticism was poison in the soul, and the first victim in its inexorable, ever-growing list was compassion. Who could speak of freedom, when one’s own soul was bound in chains?”

— Steven Erikson

100. “They died, Highness, even as they delivered those thirty thousand refugees to safety. They died, but they won.”

— Steven Erikson