A civilization can easily drown in what it knows as in what doesn't know. Consider,' he continued, Goths's Folly. Goths's curse was in being too aware - of everything. Every permutation, every potential. Enough to poison every scan he cast on the world. It availed him naught, and worse, he was aware of even that.

— 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.

— Steven Erikson

All right, shadow-priest, you've been spying — on what? What state secrets have you learned watching me groom these horses?'' Only that they hate you, Dark. Every time your back was turned, they got ready to nip you — only you always seemed to step away at precisely the right moment-''Yes, I did, since I knew what they were intending. Each time.'' Is this pride I hear? That you outwitted two horses?

— Steven Erikson

Ambition is not a dirty word. Piss on compromise. Go for the throat.

— Steven Erikson

Awful things, children. Needy, self-centered tyrants, the boys all teeth and firsts, the girls all claws and spit. Gathering into sniveling packs and sniffing out vulnerabilities — and woe to the child not cunning enough to hide their own — the others would close in like the grubby shark they were. Great pastime, savaging someone.

— Steven Erikson

But Hood was not yet done with her. He swung her up again, spun and once more hammered her onto the stone. 'I have had,' the Jag hut roared, and into the air she went again, and down once more, 'enough' - with a sob the crushed, broken body was yanked from the ground again - 'of- 'your-justice!

— Steven Erikson

Captain! You can't hold them off! I tried! I swear! They've been artificially enhanced, sir! But all the humans died out - there are bones out there by the millions! They were all suffocated by cuteness! The World is full of kittens, oh the horror!' My God,' Hadrian said. "They've finally done it! All those oh-so-cute-my-Buddy-kittens-here's-a-pic bastards! They finally went and did it!

— Steven Erikson

Chaos needs no allies, for it dwells like a poison in every one of us.

— Steven Erikson

Children understood at a very young age that doing nothing was an expression of power. Doing nothing was a choice swollen with omnipotence. It was, in fact, godly. And this, she now realized, was the reason why the gods did nothing. Proof of their omniscience. After all, to act was to announce awful limitations, for it revealed that chance acted first, the accidents were just that--events beyond the will of the gods--and all they could do in answer was to attempt to remedy the consequences, to alter natural ends. To act, then, was an admission of fallibility.

— Steven Erikson

Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortal's shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched before one now stretched before him.

— Steven Erikson