Top 500 Steven Erikson Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The past is all patterns, and those patterns remain beneath our feet, even as the stars above reveal their own patterns – for the stars we gaze upon each night are naught but an illusion from the past.”

— Steven Erikson

102. “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?”

— Steven Erikson

103. “Soldiers now and soldiers to the end of their days – none would dare leave to find peace. Solicitude and calm would unlock that safe prison of cold control – the only thing keeping them sane.”

— Steven Erikson

104. “Any reasonable ruler would have the expectation and the demand the other way round.”

— Steven Erikson

105. “You would choose only the worthy to embrace, Shield Anvil? Then what you do is not an embrace, sir. It is a reward.”

— Steven Erikson

106. “Play on, mortal. Every god falls at a mortal’s hands. Such is the only end to immortality.”

— Steven Erikson

107. “When we war against nature, we war against ourselves. There is no distinction, no dividing line, no enemy. We devour everything in a lust for self-destruction. As if that is intelligence’s only gift.”

— Steven Erikson

108. “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. One could walk in search of friends, and find naught but strangers. One could yearn for company but find little but cruel solitude.”

— Steven Erikson

109. “Language changes over time. Meaning twists. Mistakes compound with each transcribing. Even those stalwart sentinels of perfection – numbers – can, in a single careless moment, be profoundly altered.”

— Steven Erikson

110. “Every tyranny imaginable is possible when prefaced by the notion that it is for the well-being of the populace.”

— Steven Erikson

111. “We do naught but scratch the world, frail and fraught. Every vast drama of civilizations, of peoples with their certainties and gestures, means nothing, affects nothing. Life crawls on, ever on.”

— Steven Erikson

112. “The act of taking offence becomes a weapon, and its wielder feels empowered by the false indignation.”

— Steven Erikson

113. “I am Crone, eldest of the Moon’s Great Ravens, whose eyes have looked upon a hundred thousand years of human folly. Hence my tattered coat and broken beak as evidence of your indiscriminate destruction. I am but a winged witness of your eternal madness.”

— Steven Erikson

114. “And it bred caution in the unveiling of its powers. The Crippled God bred caution but not well enough, for the powers of the earth came to it in the end. Chained was the Crippled God, and so Chained was it destroyed. And upon this barren plain that imprisoned the Crippled God many gathered to the deed. Hood, gray wanderer of Death, was among the gathering, as was Dessembrae, then Hood’s Warrior – though it was here and in this time that Dessembrae shattered the bonds Hood held upon him.”

— Steven Erikson

115. “A man does not marry a girl, nor a woman. He marries a promise, and it shines with a bright purity that is ageless. It shines, in other words, with the glory of lies. The deception is self inflicted. The promise was simple in its form, as befitted the thick-headedness of young men, and in its essence it offered the delusion that the present moment was eternal; that nothing would change; not the fires of desire, not the flesh itself, not the intense look in the eye.”

— Steven Erikson

116. “Humility. Seek it within yourself, be as sceptical of your own superiority as your intellect is sceptical of the superiority of things other than itself. Turn your critical faculties inward, with ruthless diligence, and by that you will understand the true meaning of courage. It is the kind of courage that sees you end up on your knees, but with the will to rise once more, to begin it all over again.”

— Steven Erikson

117. “After all, tyranny has no sense of humour. Too thin-skinned, too thoroughly full of its own self-importance.”

— Steven Erikson

118. “Tattersail smiled. “The only death I fear is dying ignorant.”

— Steven Erikson

119. “Too many strive for the unachievable, and this pursuit consumes them. They rush frantic and desperate and so reveal weakness in the face of sadness. More than weakness, in fact. It is in truth a kind of cowardice, that which espouses an evasive disposition as if it were a virtue.”

— Steven Erikson

120. “There is but one god, and its name is beauty. There is but one kind of worship, and that is love. There is for us but one world, and we have scarred it beyond recognition.”

— Steven Erikson

121. “There are many forms of courage, I believe, most of which pass unseen by the majority of us. It’s not always about facing death, is it? Sometimes it’s about facing life.”

— Steven Erikson

122. “He had told himself that it was an act of courage to let her go, to give her the final decision. Courage and sacrifice. He no longer believed that. There was no sacrifice made in being abandoned. There was no courage in doing nothing.”

— Steven Erikson

123. “The righteous will claim sole domain on judgement. The righteous are the first to make hands into fists, the first to shout down dissenters, the first to bully others into compliance.”

— Steven Erikson

124. “Absolution – yes, I grasp the notion, but absolution is not the same as redemption, is it? The former is passive. The latter demands an effort, one with implicit sacrifice and hardship, one demanding all the higher qualities of what we call virtues.”

— Steven Erikson

125. “To the joy and the life in the eyes of my friend, I will fight all those who deem him their enemy.”

— Steven Erikson

126. “I cannot help what I am – and that is the first lie, the one I uttered to myself long ago.”

— Steven Erikson

127. “All that is worshipped is but a reflection of the worshipper.”

— Steven Erikson

128. “But the world had its layers. To the simple it offered simplicity. To the wise it offered profundity. And the only measure of courage worth acknowledging was found in accepting where one stood in that scheme – in hard, unwavering honesty, no matter how humbling.”

— Steven Erikson

129. “Death is every mortal’s shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched behind one now stretches before him.”

— Steven Erikson

130. “The demands of the self have primacy, mistress. Always, else there would be no champions. There would be no hierarchy at all. The Seguleh would be ruled by mewling martyrs blindly trampling the helpless in their lust for the common good. Or we would be ruled by despots who would hide behind an army to every challenge, creating of brute force a righteous claim to honour. We know of other lands, mistress. We know much more than you think.”

— Steven Erikson

131. “Expectation is the hoary curse of humanity. One can listen to words, and see them as the unfolding of a petal or, indeed, the very opposite: each word bent and pushed tighter, smaller, until the very packet of meaning vanishes with a flip of deft fingers. Poets and tellers of tales can be tugged by either current, into the riotous conflagration of beauteous language or the pithy reduction of the tersely colourless.”

— Steven Erikson

132. “Language was war, vaster than any host of swords, spears and sorcery. The self waging battle against everyone else. Borders enacted, defended, sallies and breaches, fields of corpses rotting like tumbled fruit. Words ever seeking allies, ever seeking iconic verisimilitude in the heaving press.”

— Steven Erikson

133. “Creation demands destruction. Survival demands that something else fails to survive. No existence was truly benign.”

— Steven Erikson

134. “It was so pathetic, really, how so much violence came from someone feeling small. Small of mind, and it did not matter how big the sword in hand, that essential smallness remained, gnawing with very sharp teeth.”

— Steven Erikson

135. “There was an old saying among the Perish that a room full of women was a knife-seller’s vision of paradise. ‘There will be betrayal.’ Oh yes indeed. Betrayal .”

— Steven Erikson

136. “Against ignorance there is no front line. Against viciousness no border can hold. It breeds as readily behind your back as elsewhere.”

— Steven Erikson

137. “Some things are important. Others are not. Yet all would claim a mortal’s attention. It falls to each of us to remain ever mindful, and thus purchase wisdom in the threading of possibilities. It is our common failing, Brys Beddict, that we are guided by our indifference to eventualities. The moment pleases, the future can await consideration.”

— Steven Erikson

138. “How does a mortal make answer to what his or her kind are capable of? Does each of us, soldier or no, reach a point when all that we’ve seen, survived, changes us inside? Irrevocably changes us. What do we become, then? Less human, or more human? Human enough, or too human?”

— Steven Erikson

139. “It was a conceit to imagine that they knew the world; that they knew its every detail. Forces ever worked unseen, in elusive patterns no mortal mind could comprehend.”

— Steven Erikson

140. “We have a talent for disguising greed under the cloak of freedom. As.”

— Steven Erikson

141. “Because they imply a unity that does not exist. Only rarely does a life have a theme, and even then such themes exist in confusion and uncertainty, and are only described by others once that life has come to an end. A tale is the binding of themes to a past, because no tale can be told as it is happening.”

— Steven Erikson

142. “Compassion existed when and only when one could step outside oneself, to suddenly see the bars from inside the cage.”

— Steven Erikson

143. “It may be that in the belief of the possibility of redemption, people willingly do wrong. Redemption waits, like a side door, there in whatever court of judgement we eventually find ourselves. Not even the payment of a fine is demanded, simply the empty negotiation that absolves responsibility.”

— Steven Erikson

144. “To measure time, one must begin. To grow futureward, one must root. Deep into the ground with blood.”

— Steven Erikson

145. “There had been times – he was almost certain – when he’d known unmitigated joy, but so faded were they to his recollection that he had begun to suspect the fictional conjuring of nostalgia. As with civilizations and their golden ages, so too with people: each individual ever longing for that golden past moment of true peace and wellness.”

— Steven Erikson

146. “The trust I have... for some people... comes down to how well I know them, and then it’s a matter of my trusting them to do what I think they’re going to do.”

— Steven Erikson

147. “Make no assumptions. About anything. Ever. Stay mindful, my friend, and suspicious. Suspicious, but not frightened by complexity.”

— Steven Erikson

148. “What I was is not what I am. Two men, identical faces, but different eyes. In what they have seen, in what they reflect upon the world.”

— Steven Erikson

149. “We will ourselves empty to numb us to our cruelty. We stiffen our faces and say we have needs. But to be empty is to have no purchase, nothing to grasp on to, and so in the emptiness we slide and we slide.”

— Steven Erikson

150. “Only a soul that has surrendered utterly gives up on notions of redemption.”

— Steven Erikson