Top 500 Steven Erikson Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Proof that the freedoms once accorded non-Letherii peoples were born of both paternalism and a self-serving posturing as a benign overseer. What is given is taken away, just like that.”

— Steven Erikson

402. “Take a thousand soldiers. Four hundred will stand in a fight but do nothing. Two hundred will run given the chance. Another hundred will get confused. That leaves three hundred you can count on. Your task in commanding that thousand is all down to knowing where to put that three hundred.”

— Steven Erikson

403. “It is the legacy of most intelligent beings to revel in slaughter for a time,’ Haut replied. ‘In this we play at being gods. In this, we lie to ourselves with delusions of omnipotence. There is but one measure to the wisdom of a people, and that is the staying hand. Fail in restraint and murder thrives in your eyes, and all your claims to civilization ring hollow.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

405. “I will answer in kind. No act is final. Another inevitably awaits.”

— Steven Erikson

406. “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

407. “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

408. “Oh, what a miserable man you are! If you’re wrong and he tries to bite me, I will be very upset with you, Mok. I will lay waste to your loins. I will make your eyes crossed so that everyone who looks at you and your silly mask will not be able to help but laugh. And I will think of other things, too, I assure you.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

410. “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

411. “It must be taken as given that a man who happens to be the world’s most powerful, most terrible, most deadly sorceror, must have a woman at his side. But it does not follow, my children, that a woman of similar proportions requires a man at hers.”

— Steven Erikson

412. “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

413. “The door flew open, carrying into the room a gust of steamy air and then Trotts.”

— Steven Erikson

414. “He strode down the empty street, cleaving the low-lying mists that swirled like incandescent cloaks in the gaslight.”

— Steven Erikson

415. “The detonation was deafening, the blast a bruised gout of flame that drove back the airborne sand and the wind carrying it, and flung the attackers and their mounts like a god’s hand, backward onto the road and off the sides.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

417. “Who in their dreams is not omnipotent? If in sleep I grow wings and fly high above the land, it does not mean I will awaken cloaked in feathers. We are gods in our dreams. Disaster strikes when we come to believe the same is true in our real lives.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

419. “Money is sleight of hand,’ Tehol said, nodding. ‘Unless you’ve got diamonds in your hands. Then it’s not just an idea any more. If you want to know the cheat behind the whole game, it’s right there, lasses. Even when money’s just an idea, it has power. Only it’s not real power. Just the promise of power. But that promise is enough so long as everyone keeps pretending it’s real. Stop pretending and it all falls apart.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

421. “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

422. “An end to my fear of being alone. An end to a soul’s solitude, when death at last arrives. There is something in that, something in there, that comforts.”

— Steven Erikson

423. “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

424. “Laughing, he’d flung dense clouds of earth and stone skyward to blind them.”

— Steven Erikson

425. “He argued that every certainty is an empty throne. That those who knew but one path would come to worship it, even as it led to a cliff’s edge. He argued, and in the silence of that ghost’s indifference to his words he came to realize that he himself spoke – fierce with heat – from the foot of an empty throne.”

— Steven Erikson

426. “The blade slid through the energy. Unaffected, the power swept over, then into Paran. Blinded, he screamed as bitter cold lanced through him, shattering his thoughts, his sense of self. An invisible hand closed around his soul. Mine! The word rang in his head, triumphant and filled with savage glee. You are mine!”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

429. “Serious people never stopped waging their war on joy and pleasure, and they were both relentless and tireless.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

431. “Cutter rubbed at his face. He needed a shave. And a bath. And clean, new clothes. And a purpose in life.”

— Steven Erikson

432. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

434. “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

435. “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

436. “Importance lies solely in the deeds done, the goals achieved. Time is preparation, nothing more. One prepares for as long as is required. To do this is to accept that planning begins at birth. You are born and before all else you are plunged into shadow, wrapped inside the holy ambivalence, there to suckle sweet sustenance.”

— Steven Erikson

437. “If indeed the universe posessed a mind, it was a cluttered one. And if corners such as these thrived in that mind, then the custodian was asleep, or, perhaps, drunk.”

— Steven Erikson

438. “The failing was that it was so easily won, and therefore became a thing of little worth for the recipient. Could no one see the hurt she felt, each and every time she was cast aside, sorely used, battered by rejection? Did they think she welcomed such feelings, the crushing despond of seeing the paucity of her worth?”

— Steven Erikson

439. “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

440. “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

441. “Strange how the past was remade to suit the present.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

443. “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

444. “Kulp saw something crumbling into ruins behind the lad’s light-blue eyes.”

— Steven Erikson

445. “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

446. “That is all faith is, you know. Pity for our souls.”

— Steven Erikson

447. “Dragonflies big enough to ride – imagine whizzing through the clouds, looking down on everything! Seeing how beautiful it all was, and then dropping hundreds of bombs on it.”

— Steven Erikson

448. “And at that instant, Ivis, so brightly painted in triumph, does the world freeze? Does time itself cease, nothing crawling on; not a single moment following in its usual tumble? But what world offers this impossibility? Only the one begat in a mind, and then raised in chains, never to be set free. The fashioning of nostalgia, my friend, imprisons us.”

— Steven Erikson

449. “If there was neither a time before nor a time after, then was not the moment of creation eternal and yet for ever instantaneous?”

— Steven Erikson

450. “Every worthwhile plan is diabolical.”

— Steven Erikson