Top 500 Steven Erikson Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Do you truly believe suicide belongs solely to the one taking his or her own life? All that rot about selfishness and self-hatred? The lies we tell ourselves to absolve us of all blame, of all the roles that we played in that wretched death?”

— Steven Erikson

402. “They are human, after all, and it is human nature to transform loss into a virtue. So that it might be lived with, so that it might be justified.”

— Steven Erikson

403. “Hard lives begat hard laws, not just in the necessities of living, but also in those of believing.”

— Steven Erikson

404. “The power he commanded insisted upon subjects. Strength was ever relative, and he could not dominate without the company of the dominated.”

— Steven Erikson

405. “Age was a demon, a haunting that slipped into the bones whispering weakness and frailty. It stole his muscles, his agility, and the quickness of his wit. It seemed a miserable reward for surviving, all things told, which was proof enough that life was a fool’s bargain.”

— Steven Erikson

406. “The historian, now witness, stumbling in the illusion that he will survive. Long enough to set the details down on parchment in the frail belief that truth is a worthwhile cause. That the tale will become a lesson heeded. Frail belief? Outright lie, a delusion of the worst sort. The lesson of history is that no one learns.”

— Steven Erikson

407. “Opposite the Half-Axe was the narrow-fronted entrance to a shop devoted to short lengths of rope and wooden poles a man and a half high. Tehol had no idea how such a specialized enterprise could survive, especially in this unravelled, truncated market, yet its door had remained open for almost six centuries, locked up each night by a short length of rope and a wooden pole.”

— Steven Erikson

408. “My inability to find peace, to trust it when I do find it, and to hold on to it.”

— Steven Erikson

409. “I would hold, my friend, that what you describe is but one side of the matter, and indeed one that looks only inward, as if the borders of your life enclose everything to be valued, while what lies beyond is of no worth whatsoever.”

— Steven Erikson

410. “The bully’s greatest terror,′ Bugg said, ‘comes when he meets someone bigger and meaner –.”

— Steven Erikson

411. “The blood in the fine, white sand was only a few hours old, still gummy to the touch. The stench of loosened bowels soured the hazy air.”

— Steven Erikson

412. “Is possession a virtue? Is a lifetime of working for some rich toad a virtue? Is loyal employment in some merchant house a virtue? Loyal to what? To whom? Oh, have they paid for that loyalty with a hundred docks a week? Like any other commodity? But then, which version is truer – the virtue of self-serving acquisitiveness or the virtue of loyalty to one’s employer? Are.”

— Steven Erikson

413. “Desires should never be justified,′ Tehol said, wagging a finger. ‘All you end up doing is illuminating the hidden reasons by virtue of their obvious absence.”

— Steven Erikson

414. “A chill crept over Duiker. Even wheeled hospitals carried with them that pervasive atmosphere of fear, the sounds of defiance and the silence of surrender. Mortality’s many comforting layers had been stripped away, revealing wracked bones, a sudden comprehension of death that throbbed like an exposed nerve.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

416. “Fiddler straightened, eyes on the stars glittering overhead. Desert stars, sharp diamonds that ever seemed eager to draw blood.”

— Steven Erikson

417. “The midday heat sapped her strength, and the sluggishness reached through to her thoughts.”

— Steven Erikson

418. “There is nothing wrong with where we are, how we are. You spit on satisfaction, leaving you always unsettled and miserable. I am a Teblor – we live simply enough, and we see the cruelty of your so-called progress. Slaves, children in chains, a thousand lies to make one person better than the next, a thousand lies telling you this is how things should be, and there’s no stopping it.”

— Steven Erikson

419. “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

420. “In my village no one is a stranger – and this is what civilization has turned it’s back on. One day, Munug, I will make a world of villages, adn the age of cities will be over. And slavery will be dead, and there shall be no chains – tell your god. Tonight, I am his knight.′ – Karsa Orlong.”

— Steven Erikson

421. “Sympathy was like water in the desert. Hoarded, reluctantly meted out in the barest of sips. And he, Taralack Veed, could walk a thousand deserts on a single drop.”

— Steven Erikson

422. “Too old to dream of perfection, perhaps, she had instead discovered a certain delicious appeal in flaws.”

— Steven Erikson

423. “Eddies of dry wind whipped tatters of cloth and reed paper about in dancing circles.”

— Steven Erikson

424. “Belief creates, Arathan. So you have been taught. The god cannot exist until it is worshipped, until it is given shape, personality. It is made in the crucible of faith.”

— Steven Erikson

425. “We are nothing but our own needs. She but showed each of us the face we hide from ourselves and everyone else. She shamed us by exposing our truths.”

— Steven Erikson

426. “Just so. And wonder, my friend, is the intellect’s most feared foe. Its path is love, and love is the language of humility. The rational mind would stand over it with a bloodstained sword, and in the empty bleakness of its eyes you will see its triumph.”

— Steven Erikson

427. “Memory did not let go; it remained the net dragged in one’s wake, with all sorts of strange things snarled in the knotted strands.”

— Steven Erikson

428. “So you ain’t nearly as good as you think you are. What a shock. Look at your clothes and armour – you’re chopped to pieces, O mighty assassin.”

— Steven Erikson

429. “A small whimper escaped her throat, then she desperately pulled her eyes away.”

— Steven Erikson

430. “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

431. “The three other rickety chairs had been pulled up around the lone table in the room’s centre. Above the table hung an oil lantern, which shone down on Fiddler, Hedge and Mallet as they sat playing cards.”

— Steven Erikson

432. “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

433. “Failure wasn’t a pleasant notion. It stung. It burned like acid.”

— Steven Erikson

434. “What is given away for free comes back wounded. Value is not always shared and some hands are rougher than others.”

— Steven Erikson

435. “Kneels? Falters? Look to the night sky, foolish man, and gauge the victor in the contest between Dark and Light.”

— Steven Erikson

436. “He rubbed at his face, as if seeking to awaken the right words from muscle, blood and bone.”

— Steven Erikson

437. “Autumn rains drumming overhead, they had squatted in a half-circle, facing north, and watched as seven robed and hooded figures approached.”

— Steven Erikson

438. “Skintick could not find himself in that future. He did not expect to complete this journey. He was not sure he even wanted to.”

— Steven Erikson

439. “There would always be, he now understood, those for whom violence was righteous. Sudden.”

— Steven Erikson

440. “The drunk answers every assault with smirking equanimity,’ observed Haut, pouring his cup full again. ‘All reasoned words thud like pebbles in the sand. Made immune, I imbibe the nectar of the gods.”

— Steven Erikson

441. “If holy words could not offer up an answer to despair, then what good were they? If the truths so revealed did not invite restitution, then their utterance was no more than a curse. And if the restitution is found not in the mortal realm, then we are invited to inaction, and indifference. Will you promise to a soul a reward buried in supposition? Are we to reach throughout our lives but never touch? Are we to dream and to hope, but never know?”

— Steven Erikson

442. “But the value was an illusion. Hate was a lie that in feeding fills the hater with the feeling of satiation, even as his spirit starves.”

— Steven Erikson

443. “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

444. “He’d forgotten how irritating company could be. Uninvited, unwelcome, persistent reminder of his own weaknesses. And.”

— Steven Erikson

445. “Closing in a noose around her neck, the sound blocked the outside world – its air, its light.”

— Steven Erikson

446. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

448. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

450. “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