The Crippled God (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #10)

by Steven Erikson

Battles are lost. It is the world’s way. But you still breathe.

When did praying achieve anything but silence? Anything but the pathetic absence filling the air, building like a bubble of nothingness in the soul? Since when didn’t a prayer leave only empty yearning, where wishes burned and longing was a knife twisting in the chest?

Choices fall away, without you even noticing, until there are very few left, and you realize that you are nothing but what you are.’

There’s no such thing as a final war! When the last human falls, when the last god breathes his last breath, the vermin shall lock jaws over the carcasses.

‘Romance is the negotiation of possibilities, towards that elusive prize called love.

To have a ruler one must choose to be ruled over, and that forces notions of inequity to the fore, until they become, well, formalized. Made central to education, made essential as a binding force in society, until everything exists to prop up those in power.

When we war against nature, we war against ourselves. There is no distinction, no dividing line, no enemy. We devour everything in a lust for self-destruction. As if that is intelligence’s only gift.’

The ethics of the world belonged to society, to that fraught maelstrom of relationships, where argument and fierce emotions waged eternal war.

We are all self-destructive. It is integral to our nature. And we will run even when there’s nowhere to run to, and nothing terrible to run from. Why? Because to walk is just as meaningless. It just takes longer.

‘If all honest observation ends up sounding critical, is it the honesty you then reject, or the act of observation?’

Nostalgia was like a disease, one that crept in and stole the colour from the world and the time you lived in. Made for bitter people. Dangerous people, when they wanted back what never was.