Steven Erikson
All art is an intensely vulnerable gesture, and it is made with no small amounts of risk, and fear. So, I have plenty of sympathy for self-defense mechanisms, especially among artists.Collection: Sympathy
When two people are paying close attention to each other, check out the others in the group and see who's observing. Human dynamics are amazing, but so much that you might learn is subconscious interplay.Collection: Amazing
I've spoken often of how the fantasy genre is able to, with the greatest freedom among all the genres, take a metaphor and make it real. But of course that's only the starting point.
I have to feel what I'm writing, right down to the core.
A story invites both writer and reader into a kind of superficial ease: we want to slide along, pleasingly entertained, lost in the fictional dream.
Believe it or not, friendships are difficult to write in fiction. They can easily come across as forced, particularly if they involve too much explication and too many overt gestures of affection.
The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.
The heart of wisdom is tolerance.Collection: Heart
Ambition is not a dirty word. Piss on compromise. Go for the throat.Collection: Dirty
Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And people die.Collection: War
The lesson of history is that no one learns.Collection: Lessons
There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail - should we fall - we will know that we have lived.Collection: Struggle
Wise words are like arrows flung at your forehead. What do you do? Why, you duck of course.Collection: Wise
It is an extraordinary act of courage,' said Tulas Shorn, 'to come to know a stranger's pain.Collection: Pain
Evil is nothing but a word, an objectification where no objectification is necessary. Cast aside this notion of some external agency as the source of inconceivable inhumanity - the sad truth is our possession of an innate proclivity towards indifference, towards deliberate denial of mercy, towards disengaging all that is moral within us. But if that is too dire , let's call it evil. And paint it with fire and venom.Collection: Fire
Show me a god that does not demand mortal suffering. Show me a god that celebrates diversity, a celebration that embraces even non-believers, and is not threatened by them. Show me a god that understands the meaning of peace. In life, not in death.Collection: Diversity
Children are dying." Lull nodded. "That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words.Collection: Children
The future can ever promise but one thing and one thing only: surprises.Collection: Promise
We humans do not understand compassion. In each moment of our lives, we betray it. Aye, we know of its worth, yet in knowing we then attach to it a value, we guard the giving of it, believing it must be earned, T’lan Imass. Compassion is priceless in the truest sense of the wold. It must be given freely. In abundance.Collection: Believe
The soul knows no greater anguish than to take a breath that begins with love and ends with grief.Collection: Grief
Can you live without answers? All of you, ask that of yourself. Can you live without answers? Because if you cannot, then most assuredly you will invent your own answers and they will comfort you. And all those who do not share your view will by their very existence strike fear and hatred into your heart. What god blesses this?Collection: Heart
Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context.Collection: Lying
No purer artist exists or has ever existed than a child freed to imagine.Collection: Children
When you've burned the bridges behind you, don't go starting a fire on the one in front of you.Collection: Fire
More than one philosopher has claimed that we ever remain children, far beneath the indurated layers that make up the armour of adulthood. 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.Collection: Children
The more civilized a nation, the more conformed its population, until that civilization's last age arrives, when multiplicity wages war with conformity. The former grows ever wilder, ever more dysfunctional in its extremities; whilst the latter seeks to increase its measure of control, until such efforts acquire diabolical tyranny.' - TravellerCollection: War
All that we were has led us to where we are, but tells us little of where we’re going. Memories are a weight you can never shrug off.Collection: Memories
Never, dear gods. Never mess with mortals.Collection: Dear God
Survivors do not mourn together. They each mourn alone, even when in the same place. Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.Collection: Grief
You must dismantle your sources, lest you do nothing but ape the prejudices of othersCollection: Prejudice
For we are all bound in stories, and as the years pile up they turn to stone, layer upon layer, building our lives.Collection: Years
Detachment is a flaw, not a virtue-don’t you realize that?Collection: Realizing
Name none of the fallen, for they stand in our place, and stand there still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown. Let it not be said that I was one among the dead to accuse the living.Collection: Names
I love you still, but with your death I succumbed to a kind of infatuation. I convinced myself that what you and I had, so very briefly, was of far vaster and deeper import than it truly was. Of all the weapons we chose to turn upon ourselves, guilt is the sharpest, Silverfox. It can carve one's own past into unrecognizable shapes, false memories leading to beliefs that sow all kinds of obsessions.Collection: Memories
What makes a Malazan soldier so dangerous? They’re allowed to think.Collection: Thinking
I mean the only thing us dead soldiers got in common is that none of us was good enough or lucky enough to survive the fight. We're a host of failures.Collection: Mean
And over it all, the butterflies swarmed, like a million yellow-pettalled flowers dancing on swirling winds.Collection: Flower
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.Collection: Desire
He was a man who would never ask for sympathy. He was a man who sought only to do what was right. Such people appear in the world, every world, now and then, like a single refrain of some blessed song, a fragment caught on the spur of an otherwise raging cacophony. Imagine a world without such souls. Yes, it should have been harder to do.Collection: Song
Shadow is ever besieged, for that is its nature. Whilst darkness devours, and light steals. And so one sees shadow ever retreat to hidden places, only to return in the wake of the war between dark and light.Collection: War
The art of illusion is grace itself.Collection: Art
The only consistent narrative we possess is one that we share with every other life-form: we are born, we live, and then we die.Collection: Narrative
None could guess my confusion, my host of deluded illusions and elusive delusions! A mantle of marble hiding a crumbling core of sandstone. See how they stare at me, wondering, all wondering, at my secret wellspring of wisdom...' Let's kill him,' Crokus muttered, 'if only to put him out of our misery.Collection: Confusion
The notion of evil for its own sake strikes me as boring -- all these Dark Lords intent on creating wastelands packed with enslaved victims... for what?Collection: Dark
We are all lone souls. It pays to know humility, lest the delusion of control, of mastery, overwhelms. And, indeed, we seem a species prone to that delusion, again and ever again." ~Fiddler, pg. 558Collection: Humility
Do mortal fools still measure the increments leading to their deaths, wagering pleasures against costs, persisting in the delusion that deeds have value, that the world and all the gods sit in judgment over every decision made or not made?Collection: Decision
Soldiers are issued armour for their flesh and bones, but they must fashion their own for their souls. Piece by piece.Collection: Fashion
Shake your fist all you want but dead is deadCollection: Fists
The harder the world, the fiercer the honour.Collection: World
Ben Adaephon Delat," Pearl said plaintively, "see the last who comes. You send me to my death." "I know," Quick Ben whispered. "Flee, then. I will hold them enough to ensure your escape no more." Quick Ben sank down past the roof. Before he passed from sight Pearl spoke again. "Ben Adaephon Delat, do you pity me?" "Yes" he replied softly, then pivoted and dropped down into darkness.Collection: Past