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

by Steven Erikson

History meant nothing, because the only continuity was human stupidity.

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

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.

They lined the friezes in temples; they leered down from balustrades. Ten thousand gods, one for every damned mood, it seemed. A pantheon of exaggerated flaws.