Gardens of the Moon (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #1)

by Steven Erikson

Never be too easy with the knowledge you possess. Words are like coin—it pays to hoard.”

“Should you ever outrun the guilt within your past, Sorceress, you will have outrun your soul. When it finds you again it will kill you.”

Despair, he told himself, always demands a direction, a focus. Find the direction and the despair goes away.

Such tears had been shed before, and would be again—by others like her and yet unlike her. And the winds would dry them all.

Through the gamut of life we struggled for control, for a means to fashion the world around us, an eternal, hopeless hunt for the privilege of being able to predict the shape of our lives.

“Imagine your spirit dying while your body lives on.

But, damn, when you take away everybody else’s humanity, you take away your own.

While the Jaghut feared community, pronouncing society to be the birthplace of tyranny—of the flesh and the spirit—and citing their own bloody history as proof, Raest discovered a hunger for it.