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

402. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

404. “Something’s nibbling my spleen!”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

406. “Fanaticism was so popular. There had to be a reason for that, didn’t there? Some vast reward to the end of thinking, some great bliss to the blessing of idiocy.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

410. “Stop talking like a sailor, Adjutant Stormy,’ Nok said. A smile amidst the red, bristling beard. ‘Ain’t no Adjutant any more, Admiral.’ Thin brows rose, and Nok said, ‘Title alone gifts the bearer with intelligence?’ Stormy nodded. ‘That it does, sir. Which is why Gesler’s a sergeant and I’m a corporal. We get stupider every year that passes.’ ‘And.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “Absence of doubt? No, nothing so egotistic as that. Nimander has plenty of doubts, so many that he’s lost his fear of them. He accepts them as easily as anything else. Is that the secret? Is that the very definition of greatness?”

— Steven Erikson

416. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “Is the universe holographic? Probably. Get microscopic enough and you start seeing pixels. I don’t know about you, but that makes me laugh. Until I think about how easy it is to hack a program. Any program.”

— Steven Erikson

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

427. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

430. “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

431. “The rush of the river was a voice, a presence. Water flowed indifferent to the heave and plunge of the sun, the shrouded moon and the slow spin of the stars. The sound reached them in a song without words, and all effort to grasp its meaning was hopeless, for, like the water itself, one could not grasp hold of sound. The flow was ceaseless and immeasurable and just as stillness did not in fact exist, so neither did true, absolute silence.”

— 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. “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

434. “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

435. “Every worthwhile plan is diabolical.”

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

443. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

445. “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

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

— Steven Erikson

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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