He fashioned an empire of sorts, bereft of cities yet plagued with the endless dramas of society, its pathetic victories and inevitable failures. The community of enslaved Mass thrived in this quagmire of pettiness. They even managed to convince themselves that they possessed freedom, a will of their own that could shape destiny. They elected champions. Furthermore, they tore down their champions once failure draped its shroud over them. Furthermore, they ran in endless circles and called it growth, emergence, knowledge. While over them all, a presence invisible to their eyes, Rest flexed his will. His greatest joy came when his slaves proclaimed him god – though they knew him not – and constructed temples to serve him and organized priesthoods whose activities mimicked Rest’s tyranny with such cosmic irony that the Jag hut could only shake his head.

— Steven Erikson

He had been born into debt, as had his father and his father before him. Indenture and slavery were two words for the same thing.

— Steven Erikson

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

— Steven Erikson

He waited a moment, as they walked side by side through the camp, and then asked, 'Sir, if there's something we can't handle how do we handle it anyway?' She either grunted or laughed from the same place that grunts came from. 'Sawtooth wedges and keep going, Beak. Throw back whatever is thrown at us. Keep going, until. . .' 'Until what?' 'It's all right, Beak, to die alongside your comrades. It's all right. Do you understand me?' 'Yes sir, I do. It is all right, because they're my friends.' 'That's right, Beak.

— Steven Erikson

I am Crone, eldest of the Moon's Great Ravens, whose eyes have looked upon a hundred thousand years of human folly. Hence, my tattered coat and broken beak as evidence of your indiscriminate destruction. I am but a winged witness of your eternal madness.

— Steven Erikson

If all we seek is an escape, what does that say about the world we live in. We are desperate with our dreams. What - oh, what - does that say?

— Steven Erikson

If not for a dumb beast's incomprehension at its own destruction beneath the loving hands of two heartbroken children.

— Steven Erikson

I have seen the face of sorrow She looks away in the distance Across all these bridges From whence I came And those spans, trussed and arched Hold up our lives as we go back again To how we thought Trento how we thought then have seen sorrow's face, But she is ever turned away And her words leave me blinder eyes make me mute do not understand what she says to me do not know if to bear attempt a flood of tears have seen her face She does not speak She does not weep She does not know me For I am, but a stone fitted in place On the bridge where she walks Lay of the BridgeburnersToc the Younger

— Steven Erikson

In my dreams I come face to face with myriad reflections of myself, all unknown and passing strange. They speak unending in languages not my own and walk with companions I have never met, in places my steps have never gone. In my dreams I walk worlds where forests crowd my knees and half the sky is walled ice. Dun herds flow like mud, vast floods tusked and horned surging over the plain, and lo, they are my memories, the migrations of my soul.

— Steven Erikson

It's our nature, isn't it? Again and again, we cling to the foolish belief that simple solutions exist

— Steven Erikson