Toll the Hounds (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #8)

by Steven Erikson

‘No, you won’t distract me this time. Your mule has just changed sex and knowing you I might be looking at a rival, but you know what? She can have you. With my blessing she can, oh yes!’ ‘Popularity is a curse,’ Iskaral said,

When it is all one can do to simply hold on, then to suffer is to weather a deluge no god can ease.

She was thinking about how a mind could turn to stone, the patterns solid and immovable in the face of seemingly unbearable pressures, and the way dust trickled down faint as whispers, unnoticed by any.

Because life was uncertain and danger waited in the guise of peaceful repose.

‘I would be most pleased,’ the High Priestess said in that well-deep voice that purred like every temptation imaginable all blended into one steaming stew of invitation, ‘if you two indulged in mutual suicide.’

‘Stand up or I’ll have my way with you right here.’ ‘In the holy vestry? Are you insane?’

No tyrant could thrive where every subject said no. The tyrant thrives when the first fucking fool salutes.

Patience, brother. We’re waiting for the official welcoming party. The killing will have to come later.’

Blend slowly closed her eyes a second time. Oh, she was hurting, and a lot of that hurt couldn’t get sewn up.

‘I see no value in modest ambitions, witch.’

‘The first law of the multitude is conformity. Civilization is the mechanism of controlling and maintaining that multitude. The more civilized a nation, the more conformed its population, until that civilization’s last age arrives, when multiplicity wages war with conformity. The former grows ever wilder, ever more dysfunctional in its extremities; whilst the latter seeks to increase its measure of control, until such efforts acquire diabolical tyranny.’

To live a hard life was to make solid and impregnable every way in, until no openings remained and the soul hid in darkness, and no one else could hear its screams, its railing at injustice, its long, agonizing stretches of sadness. Hardness without created hardness within.

Bluepearl and Mallet, both dead. The very idea of that left gaping holes that opened out beneath every thought, every feeling that leaked through her grim control.

Isolation was more than a simple defence mechanism; it also served to prepare one for more severe punishments,

‘It is an extraordinary act of courage,’ said Tulas Shorn, ‘to come to know a stranger’s pain.

goodwill is not something that needs an apology.

He’d found his god at last, one in his own image, and that was usually the way, wasn’t it? People don’t change to suit their god; they change their god to suit them.

Every god turns away at the end

The soul knows no greater anguish than to take a breath that begins in love and ends with grief.

there is nothing just in death. When the moment arrives, it is always too soon. The curse of incompletion, the loss that can never be filled. Before too long, rising like jagged rocks from the flood, there was anger.

And all at once the councillor was weeping, so broken that to bear witness was to break deep within oneself.

Survivors do not mourn together. They each mourn alone, even when in the same place. Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.

In love, grief is a promise.

‘The future, my friend, is ever turned away, even when it faces us.’

‘There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail – should we fall – we will know that we have lived.’