Top 500 Steven Erikson Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

408. “When those dreams in that unreachable future suddenly rise up around you, how can you not be blinded to their truths? All at once, it is here. All at once, you are living in its very midst. Why then must you seek to pull away? He.”

— Steven Erikson

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

414. “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

415. “They take us at this moment, these unwavering men and women who presume to rule over us, and but point us in the direction of a weaker victim. This is their game, knowing or not, and as ever the assumption is that we’ll never turn on our masters – so long as an enemy remains within reach of our blunted, frustrated fury. And.”

— Steven Erikson

416. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

430. “When robbed, the rich cry out for protection and prosecution. When stealing, they expect the judiciary to look the other way.”

— Steven Erikson

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

436. “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

437. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

443. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

445. “Eventually every man reaches a point where every memory is unwelcome.”

— Steven Erikson

446. “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

447. “And so, yet again, we crush the blossom in our hand, lift our gaze from the tumbling petals, and ask the world, ‘Where, then, is this beauty you promised?”

— Steven Erikson

448. “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

449. “And we’re not talking mild snoring, either. Imagine being chained to the floor of a cave, with the tide crashing in, louder, louder, louder –.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson