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 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, Dust of Dreams
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Steven Erikson Malazan Book of the Fallen
Yes, make yourself useless to humankind. Only thus will you survive, even when what survives of you is naught but your bones.
— Heboric Ghost-hands, The Bonehunters
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Steven Erikson Malazan Book of the Fallen
But let me describe the characteristics of peace, my young friend. A pervasive dulling of the senses, a decadence afflicting the culture, evinced by a growing obsession with low entertainment. The virtues of extremity - honor, loyalty, sacrifice - are lifted high as shoddy icons, currency for the cheapest of labors. The longer peace lasts, the more those words are used, and the weaker they become. Sentimentality pervades daily life. All becomes a mockery of itself, and the spirit grows… Restless.
— The Crippled God, Midnight Tides
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Steven Erikson Malazan Book of the Fallen
No-one asks the spirit or the god, when the icon is fashioned, if it wishes entrapment. Do they? The need to make such vessels is a mortal’s need. That one can rest eyes on the thing one worships is an assertion of control at worst, or at best the illusion that one can negotiate over one’s own fate.
— Onrack, House of Chains
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Steven Erikson Malazan Book of the Fallen
They even managed to convince themselves that they possessed freedom, a will of their own that could shape destiny. They elected champions. They tore down their champions once failure draped its shroud over them. They ran in endless circles and called it growth, emergence, knowledge.
— Steven Erikson, Gardens of the Moon
tags:
Steven Erikson Malazan Book of the Fallen
