The God is Not Willing: The First Tale of Witness

by Steven Erikson

I would indeed wager that each and every ruined monument is a testament to stupidity. Nothing of wisdom survives. Only the vainglorious travesties of pride and idiocy.

‘You saved my life.’ Damisk shrugged. ‘No such thing as saving a life, Rant. Better to say I happened by to prolong it.

Honest and profound

there wasn’t much of the world that he liked. At least, not when it came to the world of people. Too many of them were stupid.

Amen😂😂

Stupid people always had a reason to be angry but didn’t have the capacity to understand that they were angry because they were frustrated, and they were frustrated because they didn’t understand, and they didn’t understand because they were stupid.

😲 so true

even smart people could be stupid on occasion, or stupid about some things even if smart about others.

He wasn’t particularly smart, but neither was he particularly stupid. When he revisited the conclusion that he didn’t much like people, he always included himself.

stupid people outnumber smart people. If that wasn’t true, we wouldn’t suffer over and over again, through generation after generation and on for ever.

The present age is only unique because you live in it. When you die, you cease to care about that age. And you know this. Which is why you don’t care about anything past your own life. Why should you?

Being a child meant being half-blind to what was and growing up was finally seeing how things really were.

It takes a small mind to believe that the world is as simple as it seems.

Oh boy....

What if what we’re given in our lives is all there is? No hand of judgement, no weighing of deeds.

Ignore the wheedling, the self-pity, the cries that we didn’t know any better. We did know better. We’ve always known better.

Man and woman both, there was an age that, when reached, made the world beyond seem to fall away, drained of colour, devoid of significance. To live as a thing no longer desired but tolerated, at best humoured. To reach that age was to know the light in the eyes dimming – the first spark to wink out, and from that moment on, the shadows just crept ever closer.

‘It is one thing to measure a man when all goes his way. See such a man thwarted, and his true nature is revealed.’

‘They have scouted us just as we have scouted them, Warleader.’ ‘What? Did you see such scouts?’ ‘I did. In fact, we passed one another within shouting range. I cursed them. They cursed me. I brandished my lance. They showed me their bared asses.’ She paused, and then shrugged. ‘I deem they won the exchange, for the asses were hairy and ugly.’

You do not turn away. You do not rush back to your own life, your own world, and tell yourself that your family, your loved ones, are all that matters. Were they indeed all that mattered, then in your world not one person who’s not you or your family would give a flying fuck about you, or them. And in a world like that, why, it might well be better to be dead than alive.