Top 500 Steven Erikson Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

304. “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

305. “Power may have ten thousand faces, but the look in the eyes of every one of them is the same.”

— Steven Erikson

306. “You and I, we have seen all of this before, the manner in which two opposing forces – no matter how disparate their origins, no matter how righteously one begins the conflict – end up becoming virtually identical to each other.”

— Steven Erikson

307. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

309. “Sometimes,’ Brys ventured, ’when nothing can be shared except regret, then regret must serve as the place to begin. Reconciliation does not demand that one side surrender to the other. The simple, mutual recognition that mistakes were made is in itself a closing of the divide.”

— Steven Erikson

310. “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

311. “Why not worship money? At least its rewards are obvious and immediate. But no, that was simplistic. Letherii worship was more subtle, its ethics bound to those traits and habits that well served the acquisition of wealth. Diligence, discipline, hard work, optimism, the personalization of glory. And the corresponding evils: sloth, despair and the anonymity of failure. The world was brutal enough to winnow one from the other and leave no room for doubt or mealy equivocation.”

— Steven Erikson

312. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

314. “You cannot be remade unless you are first broken.”

— Steven Erikson

315. “Compassion is never enough. Nor is the hunger for vengeance. But, for now, for what awaits us, perhaps they will do. We are the Bonehunters, and sail to another name. Beyond Aren, beyond Raraku and beyond Y’Ghatan, we now cross the world to find the first name that will be truly our own. Shared by none other. We sail to give answer.”

— Steven Erikson

316. “Instead, we fell inside ourselves, ever deeper, that endless eating and spitting out and eating all we spat out – this is the seductive sustenance of hatred and spite, of rage and vengeance.”

— Steven Erikson

317. “Precipitous creature,′ Kruppe muttered, reaching for the mug of wine the man had left behind. ‘Ah, look at this,’ he said, frowning up at Crokus, ‘nigh two-thirds full. A potential waste!’ Kruppe drank it down in one swift gulp, then sighed. ‘Said potential averted, Dessembrae be praised.”

— Steven Erikson

318. “Compassion. Love. It was not civilization that birthed these gentle gifts... A civilization was the means by which too many people could live together despite their mutual hatred. And those moments where love and community burgeoned forth, the cynics descended like vultures eager to feed, and the skies soured, and the moment died away.”

— Steven Erikson

319. “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

320. “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

321. “Some wounds never heal, and that man has just taken such a wounding.”

— Steven Erikson

322. “Laws are broken. Existence holds to no laws. Existence is what persists, and to persist is to struggle. In the end, the struggle fails.”

— Steven Erikson

323. “We have a talent for disguising greed under the cloak of freedom. As for past acts of depravity, we prefer to ignore those. Progress, after all, means to look ever forward, and whatever we have trampled in our wake is best forgotten.”

— Steven Erikson

324. “Anarchists live in fear and long for death, because they despair of seeing in others the very virtues they lack in themselves. In this manner, they take pleasure in sowing destruction, if only to match their inner landscape of ruin.”

— Steven Erikson

325. “I would say, most of the time, yes. Fear that our opinions might be challenged. Fear that our way of seeing things might be called ignorant, self-serving, or indeed evil. Fear for our persons. Fear for our future, our fate. Our moment of death. Fear of failing in all that we set out to achieve. Fear of being forgotten.”

— Steven Erikson

326. “The truth of futility was the hardest truth of all, and for those clear-eyed enough to see it, there was no escape.”

— Steven Erikson

327. “Why is it, I wonder, that organizations such as yours are invariably run by pitiful human failures? By small-minded psychotics and perverts. All bullied as children, of course. Or abused by twisted parents – I’m sure you have terrible tales to confess, of your miserable youth. And now the power is in your hands, and oh how the rest of us suffer.”

— Steven Erikson

328. “Strings glared at his new corporal. ‘Where’d you learn that skill?’ The man shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Don’t like getting hit.’ ‘Well, do you ever counter-attack?’ Tarr frowned. ‘Sure. When they’re tired.”

— Steven Erikson

329. “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

330. “Sites of battle held on to a madness, as if the blood that had soaked into the soil remembered pain and terror and held locked within it the echoes of screams and death cries.”

— Steven Erikson

331. “A wayward wind drew a wintry breath across the scene with a sound like a gasp, shivering the grasses.”

— Steven Erikson

332. “I am not empty inside. I am not at peace.’ The word seemed to startle him. ‘Peace? I spoke not of peace. In absence, Korya, there is yearning.’ His strange eyes focused on her. ‘Do you not so yearn?”

— Steven Erikson

333. “Victory is an illusion. In all things.”

— Steven Erikson

334. “His dying shriek rose skyward.”

— Steven Erikson

335. “When it is all one can do to simply hold on, then to suffer is to weather a deluge no god can ease.”

— Steven Erikson

336. “Ah, Meese has brought us her finest goblets! A moment, whilst Kruppe sweeps out cobwebs, insect husks and other assorted proofs of said goblets’ treasured value.”

— Steven Erikson

337. “Look not to our unknown benefactor for salvation. This is humanity’s war upon itself and the only salvation possible must be found in the eyes of our brother, our sister, our neighbor. Do find the courage, my beloved friend, to meet that gaze.”

— Steven Erikson

338. “This, then, is friendship. A family you choose. What you give to it, you give freely. What you withhold from it, measures its depth.”

— Steven Erikson

339. “I, Borduke of the 6th squad in the 9th Company of the 8th Legion, swear on the downy belly of the Queen of Dreams that the creature before me is a natural, unaltered Birdshit scorpion, and may my father’s ghost remain in its tomb, since the inheritance was mine to lose anyway, right? Dead means you don’t care any more, right? It had better, because if it doesn’t, then I’m doomed to paternal haunting for the rest of my days.”

— Steven Erikson

340. “It is not enough to wish for a better world for the children. It is not enough to shield them with ease and comfort. Lostara Yil, if we do not sacrifice our own ease, our own comfort, to make the future’s world a better one, then we curse our own children. We leave them a misery they do not deserve; we leave them a host of lessons unearned.”

— Steven Erikson

341. “Rigga, Riggalai the Seer, the wax-witch who trapped souls in candles and burned them. Souls devoured in flame –.”

— Steven Erikson

342. “Light exploded behind Felisin’s eyes as she sprawled sideways.”

— Steven Erikson

343. “His agonized scream rode the cascading waves of power as they swept across the terrace.”

— Steven Erikson

344. “Then we’re dead all that much sooner. So it goes.”

— Steven Erikson

345. “Peace reigned in silence, inside and out, in isolation and exhaustion.”

— Steven Erikson

346. “And in the city on all sides, the howling of the Hounds rose in an ear-shattering, soul-flailing crescendo. The Lord of Death had arrived, to walk the streets in the City of Blue Fire.”

— Steven Erikson

347. “The simple ones aren’t simple. The broken ones aren’t broken. They are rearranged.”

— Steven Erikson

348. “Besides, captain, have you no interest in seeing Lord Henarald’s expression when he learns that my master seeks to commission a sword?’ Galar Baras’s head snapped round in shock.”

— Steven Erikson

349. “The laws are not what they seem. Order is an illusion. It hides its lies in your very eyes, deceiving all they see. Because to see is to change that which is seen. No, none of us will ever see true. We cannot. It is impossible. I give you a life without answers, my children.”

— Steven Erikson

350. “My God,” Hadrian said. “They finally did it! All those oh-so-cute-my-cuddly-kitten-here’s-a-pic bastard! They finally went and did it!”

— Steven Erikson