Top 500 Steven Erikson Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Crowd control.’ ‘Excuse me?’ ‘That’s all civilization is, T’riss. A means by which we manage the proliferation of our kind. It increases in complexity the more of us there are. Laws keep us muzzled and punishment delivers the necessary message when those laws are broken. Civilizations in decline are notable when certain of their members escape justice, and do so with impunity.”

— Steven Erikson

252. “For the wise, even joy was tinged with sorrow.”

— Steven Erikson

253. “What frightened Paran most, these days, was that he had grown used to being used. He’d been someone else so many times that he saw a thousand faces, heard a thousand voices, all at war with his own.”

— Steven Erikson

254. “Trull Sengar kills, and kills, and then, when it is done and he kneels in the blood of the kin he has slain, he weeps.”

— Steven Erikson

255. “Generally speaking, people useless at everything else become academics.”

— Steven Erikson

256. “The son, after all, is but an extension of the mother – at least so the mother believed, there in some inarticulate part of her soul, unseen yet solid as an iron chain. Assail the child and so too the mother is assailed, for what is challenged is her life as a mother, the lessons she taught or didn’t teach, the things she chose not to see, to explain away, to pretend were otherwise than what they were.”

— Steven Erikson

257. “We faced a choice then,’ Haut went on. ‘To resume our onward journey, or to turn round, to discover the blessing that is walking back the way we came. In our standing in one place, we argued for centuries, until finally, in our mutual and well-deserved disgust, we each chose our own paths.’ ‘And so ended your civilization.’ ‘It was never much of one to begin with. But then, few are.”

— Steven Erikson

258. “Histories, they’re just what’s survived. But they’re not the whole story, because the whole story can never be known. Think of all the histories we’ve gone and lost. Not just kingdoms and empires, but the histories inside every one of us, every person who ever lived.”

— Steven Erikson

259. “The tunnels shrieked with the wind, each one with its own febrile pitch, creating a fierce chorus.”

— Steven Erikson

260. “A man possessing power must act decisively, Ganoes Paran, else it would trickle away through his fingers.”

— Steven Erikson

261. “Why do the survivors remain anonymous – as if cursed – while the dead are revered? Why do we cling to what we lose while we ignore what we still hold?”

— Steven Erikson

262. “What must be understood is this: attackers attack as a form of defence. It is their instinctive response to threat, real or perceived. It may be desperate or it may be habit, or both, when desperation becomes a way of life. Behind the assault hides a fragile person.”

— Steven Erikson

263. “Those whom the gods choose, ’tis said, they first separate from other mortals – by treachery, by stripping from you your spirit’s lifeblood. The gods will take all your loved ones, one by one, to their death. And, as you harden, as you become what they seek, the gods smile and nod. Each company you shun brings you closer to them. ‘Tis the shaping of a tool, son, the prod and pull, and the final succour they offer you is to end your loneliness – the very isolation they helped you create.”

— Steven Erikson

264. “Stone, sea, forest, city – and every creature that ever lived – all share the same struggle. Being resists unbeing. Order wars against the chaos of dissolution, of disorder.”

— Steven Erikson

265. “A civilization was the means by which too many people could live together despite their mutual hatred.”

— Steven Erikson

266. “Whiskeyjack’s eyes widened as a crowd of excited guests poured out from the main chamber and gathered on the terrace.”

— Steven Erikson

267. “No one could claim that Preda Norlo Trumb was the most perceptive of individuals, and the half-dozen Letherii guards under his command, who stood in a twitching clump behind the Preda, were now faced with the very real possibility that Trumb’s stupidity was going to cost them their lives.”

— Steven Erikson

268. “Peace did not serve order; order served peace, and when order became godlike, sacrosanct and inviolate, then the peace thus won became a prison, and those who sought their freedom became enemies to order, and in the elimination of such enemies, peace was lost.”

— Steven Erikson

269. “When wealth ascends to a point where the majority of the poor finally comprehend that it is, for each of them, unattainable, then all civility collapses, and anarchy prevails.”

— Steven Erikson

270. “We have witnessed life’s myriad struggles. From the lone creature suffering its last moments to thousands dying in a bleak season. And what have we learned? Only that life is its own purpose. And that, where there is life, there shall be suffering. Has it any meaning? Is existence reason enough?”

— Steven Erikson

271. “The only consistent narrative we possess is one that we share with every other life-form: we are born, we live, and then we die.”

— Steven Erikson

272. “He is strong enough to stand exposed, revealing all that is vulnerable within him. He is brave enough to invite you ever closer. If you hurt him, he will withdraw, as he must, and that path to him will be thereafter for ever sealed. But he begins with the gift of himself. What the other does with it defines the future of that particular relationship.”

— Steven Erikson

273. “A man pushed from behind by many hands will go in but one direction, no matter what he wills.”

— Steven Erikson

274. “Whatever evil you let ride becomes commonplace, eventually. Problem is, it’s easier to get used to it than carve it out.”

— Steven Erikson

275. “In natural justice, Arathan, the weak cannot hide, unless we grant them the privilege. And understand, it is ever a privilege, for wich the weak should be eternally grateful. At any given moment, should the strong will it, they can swing a sword and end the life of the weak. And that will be today’s lesson. Forbearance.”

— Steven Erikson

276. “Gifts are rarely appreciated,′ Arathan said, and in his mind he was remembering his first night with Feren. ‘And the one who receives knows only confusion. At first. And then hunger... for more. And in that hunger, there is expectation, and so the gift ceases being a gift, and becomes payment, and to give itself becomes a privilege and to receive it a right. By this all sentiment sours.”

— Steven Erikson

277. “Odd, isn’t it, how we now deliver upon another nation what we would not have done to ourselves.”

— Steven Erikson

278. “Bah! You’re not worth the effort anyway!’ And all at once she collapsed into a heap of spiders that scurried in all directions.”

— Steven Erikson

279. “The world is inherited by the obnoxious, not the righteous.”

— Steven Erikson

280. “At some point, no matter how repressive the regime, the citizenry will come to comprehend the vast power in their hands. The destitute, the Indebted, the beleaguered middle classes; in short, the myriad victims. Control was sleight of hand trickery, and against a hundred thousand defiant citizens, it stood no real chance.”

— Steven Erikson

281. “The dull, hazy light played along the polished blade like water.”

— Steven Erikson

282. “Laws decide wich forms of oppression are allowed, Lord. And because of that, those laws are servants to those in power, for whom oppression is given as a right over those who have little or no power.”

— Steven Erikson

283. “Fighting is for people who fail at everything else.”

— Steven Erikson

284. “The sky cares nothing for you, dear one. The stars don’t even see you.”

— Steven Erikson

285. “The curse of the witless is to beat one’s head against the obstinate wall of how things really are, rather than what they insist upon their being.”

— Steven Erikson

286. “As with all things, layer settles upon layer, and in time the deepest, darkest ones become forgotten – yet they have shaped all that lies above.”

— Steven Erikson

287. “How perfect is running? This grand delusion of flight? Away from our demons, ever away, until even the self sobs loose, spins lost in our wake. Perfect, oh yes. And a thing to despise. No distance can win an escape; no speed can outrun this self and all its host of troubles. It’s only the sweet exhaustion that follows that we so cherish. An exhaustion so pure it is as close to dying as we can get without actually doing so.”

— Steven Erikson

288. “All right. Let’s try something else. I take it you see no point in history.’ He grunted. ‘If by that you mean that there is no progress, that even the notion of progress is a delusion, and that history is nothing more than a host of lessons nobody wants to pay attention to, then yes, there is no point. Not in writing it down, not in teaching it.”

— Steven Erikson

289. “Then darkness swept in around him and he knew no more.”

— Steven Erikson

290. “And then he saw the chains, snapping down through the clouds to crack thunderously on the horizon. Hundreds of chains, impossibly huge, black, whipping in the air with explosions of red dust, crisscrossing the sky. Horror filled his soul.”

— Steven Erikson

291. “A true believer, indeed, need never draw a weapon, need never rise in argument, or howl in fury, or make fists, or roll in a mob to crush some helpless, innocent enemy. A true believer needs none of those things. How much of the world insists on living this lie?”

— Steven Erikson

292. “Something awaits me. I do not mean this mad Emperor. Something else. Answer me this. How does one measure time?’ ‘By the course of the sun, the phases of the moon, the wheel of the stars. And, of course, in cities such as this one, the sounding of a bell at fixed intervals – a wholly absurd conceit and, indeed, one that is spiritually debilitating.”

— Steven Erikson

293. “She’d forgotten what love could do, as it threaded its roots through her entire soul, as it tugged and pulled at her thoughts, obsession ripening like seductive fruit. She felt only its life, thickening within her, claiming all she was.”

— Steven Erikson

294. “The Claw smiled. “You have begun to learn, Paran. Never be too easy with the knowledge you possess. Words are like coin – it pays to hoard.”

— Steven Erikson

295. “For one who is poison, there is great pleasure in anguish. In wild longing. In the meaningless explorations of delighted surrender, subjugation – well, subjugation that was in truth domination – no point in being coy here. I surrender in order to demand. Relinquish in order to rule.”

— Steven Erikson

296. “Fallen. Who tracks our footsteps, I wonder? We who are the forgotten, the discounted and the ignored. When the path is failure, it is never willingly taken. The fallen. Why does my heart weep for them? Not them but us, for most assuredly I am counted among them. Slaves, serfs, nameless peasants and labourers, the blurred faces in the crowd – just a smear on memory, a scuffing of feet down the side passages of history.”

— Steven Erikson

297. “Courting is the art of growing like mould on the one you want.”

— Steven Erikson

298. “He had been born into debt, as had his father and his father before him. Indenture and slavery were two words for the same thing.”

— Steven Erikson

299. “People suffered, many died, but they struggled through and they survived.”

— Steven Erikson

300. “Giving advice to a child is like flinging sand at an obsidian wall. Nothing sticks. The brutal truth is that we each suffer our own lessons – they can’t be danced round. They can’t be slipped past. You cannot gift a child with your scars – they arrive like webs, constricting, suffocating, and that child will struggle and strain until they break. No matter how noble your intent, the only scars that teach them anything are the ones they earn themselves.”

— Steven Erikson