Midnight Tides Quotes

“You realize, don't you, that I've worked very hard at cultivating apathy. In fact, it seems to be bearing endless fruit.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“The Down Markets opened out onto it from three sides; a more decrepit collection of useless items for sale Tehol had yet to see. And the people bought in a frenzy, day after blessed day.Our civilization thrives on stupidity.And it only took a sliver of cleverness to tap that idiot vein and drink deep of the riches. Comforting, if slightly depressing. The way of most grim truths.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“They are the sentinels of futility. Acquitors of the absurd. Reflections of ourselves, forever trapped in aimless repetition. Forever indistinct, for that is all we can manage when we look upon ourselves, upon our lives. Sensations, memories and experiences, the fetid soil in which thoughts take root. Pale flowers beneath an empty sky.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“The Nerek believed that they were the children of a woman and a serpent, and that the serpent dwelt still within the body, that gently curved spine, the stacked knuckles reaching up to hide its head in the centre of the brain. But the mountains despised that serpent, desired only to drag it back to the ground, to return it once more to its belly, slithering in the cracks and coiled beneath rocks. And so, in the course of a life, the serpent was made to bow, to bend and twist.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“Withal of the Third City. You have fought wars. You have forged weapons. You have seen loyalty, and honour. You have seen courage and sacrifice. What say you to all this?’
‘Nothing,’ Withal replied.
Hacking laughter. ‘You fear angering me, yes? No need. I give you leave to speak your mind.’
‘I have sat in my share of taverns,’ Withal said, ‘in the company of fellow veterans. A select company, perhaps, not grown so blind with sentimentality as to fashion nostalgia from times of horror and terror. Did we spin out those days of our youth? No. Did we speak of war? Not if we could avoid it, and we worked hard at avoiding it.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Because the faces come back. So young, one after another. A flash of life, an eternity of death, there in our minds. Because loyalty is not to be spoken of, and honour is to be endured. Whilst courage is to be survived. Those virtues, Chained One, belong to silence.’...”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“What makes me worse than any other corpse?’
‘Other corpses don’t fight back, for one thing.’
The undead woman came closer. ‘Why would I feel compelled to resist? Is she
not simply making me pretty?’
‘Of course. I was just making conversation. And how have you been, Shurq
Elalle?’
‘The same.’
‘The same. Which is?’
‘I’ve been better. Still, many would call consistency a virtue.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“Old men and the dead were the first whisperers of the word vengeance. Old men and the dead stood at the same wall, and while the dead faced it, old men held their backs to it. Beyond that wall was oblivion. They spoke from the end times, and both knew a need to lead the young onto identical paths, if only to give meaning to all they had known and all they had done.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“But compassion was engagement, a mindfulness beyond that of mere witness,”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“the question of what is deserved should rarely, if ever, be asked. Asking it leads to deadly judgement, and acts of unmitigated evil. Atrocity revisited in the name of justice breeds its own atrocity”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“Udinaas had known many for whom certainty was a god, the only god, no matter the cast of its features. And he had seen the manner in which such belief made the world simple, where all was divisible by the sharp cleaving of cold judgement, after which no mending was possible.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“Why not worship money? At least its rewards are obvious and immediate. But no, that was simplistic. Letherii worship was more subtle, its ethics bound to those traits and habits that well served the acquisition of wealth. Diligence, discipline, hard work, optimism, the personalization of glory. And the corresponding evils: sloth, despair and the anonymity of failure.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“Perhaps that is the truth of madness, when a mind can do nothing but make endless lists of the mundane tasks awaiting it, as proof of its sanity. Mend those nets. Wind those strands. See? I have not lost the meaning of my life.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“A hunter. A killer. One who probably also possessed the trait of long silences. She could imagine this Binadas, sharing a fire in the wilderness with Hull Beddict. In the course of an evening, a night and the following morning, perhaps a half-dozen words exchanged between them. And, she suspected, the forging of a vast, depthless friendship. These were the mysteries of men, so baffling to women. Where silences could become a conjoining of paths. Where a handful of inconsequential words could bind spirits in an ineffable understanding. Forces at play that she could sense, indeed witness, yet ever remaining outside them. Baffled and frustrated and half disbelieving.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“Words knit the skein between and among women. And the language of gesture and expression, all merging to fashion a tapestry that, as every woman understood, could tear in but one direction, by deliberate, vicious effort. A friendship among women knew but one enemy, and that was malice. Thus, the more words, the tighter the weave.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“Destiny wounds us all,’ she replied, ‘and we Letherii wear the scars with pride. Most of us,’ she added with an apologetic look at Hull. ‘One of your virtues?’ ‘Yes, if you could call it that. We have a talent for disguising greed under the cloak of freedom. As for past acts of depravity, we prefer to ignore those. Progress, after all, means to look ever forward, and whatever we have trampled in our wake is best forgotten.’ ‘Progress, then,’ Binadas said, still smiling, ‘sees no end.’ ‘Our wagons ever roll down the hill, Hiroth. Faster and faster.’ ‘Until they strike a wall.’ ‘We crash through most of those.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“Knowledge is not enough. It never is. It’s the capacity to do something with that knowledge. To do it perfectly. Absolute timing. With devastating consequences.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“There are beliefs that constitute the official religion of a nation, but those beliefs and that religion are in truth little more than the thinnest gold hammered on far older bones. No nation is singular, or exclusive—rather, it should not be, for its own good. There is much danger in asserting for oneself a claim to purity; whether of blood or of origin. Few may acknowledge it, but Lether is far richer for its devouring minorities, provided that digestion remains eternally incomplete.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“Like a bed of gold in a mountain stream, a blurred gleam swimming before his eyes. Udinaas leaned back, only now fully feeling the leaden weight of his exhausted muscles, slung like chains from his bones.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“It’s a storm,’ he said after a moment. ‘Storms pass. I need a reason to procrastinate.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“You should be more sympathetic to Ublala, master,’ Bugg said over a shoulder. ‘He’s a very unhappy man.’ ‘Sympathy belongs to the small-membered, Bugg. Ublala has three women drooling all over him, or have you forgotten?’ ‘That’s a rather disgusting image.’ ‘You’ve been too old too long, dear servant. There’s nothing inherently disgusting about drool.’ He paused, then said, ‘All right, maybe there is. However, do we have to talk about sex? That subject makes me nostalgic.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“Does it ever strike you, Finadd, that peace leads to an indulgence in strife?’ ‘No, since your statement is nonsensical. The opposite of peace is war, while war is an extreme expression of strife. By your argument, life is characterized as an oscillation between strife during peace and strife during war.’ ‘Not entirely nonsensical, then,’ Turudal Brizad said. ‘We exist in a state of perpetual stress. Both within ourselves and in the world beyond.’ He shrugged. ‘We may speak of a longing for balance, but in our soul burns a lust for discord.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“got nothing against them—’ ‘They don’t like you.’ ‘They don’t? Why?’ ‘No reason. They just don’t.’ ‘Then I don’t like them either.’ ‘So you say, but I haven’t seen any proof.’ ‘You want proof? Good. Let’s go.’ Shurq hooked one arm in Ublala’s and led him towards the far edge of the roof. ‘We have to jump to that other roof,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you can do it, Ublala. Not quietly, anyway.’ ‘Yes I can. I’ll show you I can.’ ‘We’ll see…’ Tehol stared after them, then he swung to Bugg. The manservant shrugged. ‘It’s the complexities of the male mind, master.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“The face of wealth stayed mostly hidden, leaving only the ravaged mien of poverty, and that was at times almost overwhelming. Beyond the Indebted were the lost, those who had given up entirely, and among them could be seen not just refugees from annexed tribes, but Letherii as well—more than he would have imagined. For all the explosive growth driving the kingdom, it seemed an ever greater proportion of the population was being left behind, and that was troubling. At what point in the history of Letheras, he wondered, did rampant greed become a virtue? The level of self-justification required was staggering in its tautological complexity, and it seemed language itself was its greatest armour against common sense.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“You can’t leave all these people behind. They’re outside the endless excitement and lust, the frenzied accumulation. They’re outside and can only look on with growing despair and envy. What happens when rage supplants helplessness? Increasingly, the ranks of the military were filling with the lowest classes. Training, acceptable income and a full belly provided the incentives, yet these soldiers were not enamoured of the civilization they were sworn to defend.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“And what value is all that pride you seek, Rhulad Sengar? You mortals baffle me. It is a fool’s curse, to measure oneself in endless dissatisfaction.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“Shurq Elalle:" It’s a miserable existence. Day after day, night after night. One step in front of the other, on and on to nowhere in particular. "
Tehol Beddict: "And being dead has changed all that?”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“.A truly successful leader is a reluctant leader. Not one whose every word is greeted with frenzied cheering either—after all, what happens to the mind of such a leader, after such scenes are repeated again and again? A growing certainty, a belief in one’s own infallibility, and onward goes the march into disaster.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“whoever decided that competition is always and without exception a healthy attribute?”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“Tehol collected his cup and cautiously sniffed. Then he frowned at his manservant.
Who shrugged. ‘We don’t have no herbs, master. I had to improvise.’
‘With what? Sheep hide?’
Bugg’s brows rose. ‘Very close indeed. I had some leftover wool.’
‘The yellow or the grey?’
‘The grey.’
‘Well, that’s all right, then.’ He sipped. ‘Smooth.’
‘Yes, it would be.’
‘We’re not poisoning ourselves, are we?’
‘Only mildly, master.’
‘There are times,’ Shurq Elalle said, ‘when I regret being dead. This is not one of those times, however.’
The two men eyed her speculatively, sipping at their tea.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“The Queen’s Consort?’
‘Yes. I once robbed him.’
‘Indeed! And what did you take?’
‘His virginity.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides